Former Bush Aide Unveils Targeting Firm

A new firm founded by two prominent political operatives will made its “formal announcement” to the market today, touting a breakthrough in the ability to microtarget online political audiences.Resonate Networks, co-founded by former White House Political Affairs Director Sara Taylor and public advocacy consultant John Brady, has revenues in the millions after only five months of operation, a spokesman says. Until now their services have not been unveiled to the market at large.The company uses a proprietary targeting platform to help candidates and public advocacy campaigns target Internet users based on a wide range of factors, including their orientation on specific issues and their engagement level with those issues.To some familiar with microtargeting, this sounds like little new.“Anything you can ask of enough people you can model,” said Ken Strasma, who did targeting work for President Obama’s campaign.Most targeting focuses on the offline world, attempting to differentiate one specific voter from his neighbor so that each can be contacted with phone calls and mail centered on their interests.Online, targeted contact of individuals is much more difficult—and more restricted by federal regulation. So instead of targeting individuals, Resonate Networks’ algorithms, their “black box,” as COO Andy Hunn calls it, reveals “where online we can find people in high concentrations who are interesting to us.”If, for example, a campaign wants to reach those who have written a letter in support of a healthcare cause, Resonate offers a specific portfolio of websites where such individuals congregate. Resonate has partnered with almost 500 web developers, on whose sites—many the small sites most useful for this kind of targeting—where they can now place display ads for their clients.Most targeters looking to bring their offline data online turn to Google and Yahoo. Google uses content—of a site or a web search—as well as geography to target ads. They are beginning to roll out targeting based on a web user’s interests, as well. Google also has its own advertising network that allows clients to place ads on specific websites.But since most data collection is done for the offline world, microtargeters partnering with Google are force to translate their data to new “proxy demographics” more compatible with the capabilities of the Google ad network, representatives from Resonate say.“No other ad network can target on attitude,” Taylor said.Though their clients are confidential, Hunn says early campaigns are promising. In one, Resonate’s clients saw ad click-through rates five times higher than their opponents’; in another, almost 50 percent of people who clicked through continued on to take action. And investors have taken note—to the tune of $2 million. Investors include prominent political figures from both sides of the aisle, from former Clinton chief of staff Harold Ickes to Alex Gage, one of the first politicos to make use of microtargeting when he worked for Bush’s ’04 campaign.