How Campaign Consultants Helped Marco Rubio to Victory

Marco Rubio’s victory in the Florida U.S. Senate election last November was one of the most impressive among many Republican triumphs. Pitted against sitting Governor Charlie Crist (a Republican running as an Independent) and Democratic U.S. Rep. Kendrick Meek, Rubio won with an impressive 49 percent of the vote. While Rubio was clearly a talented candidate with a compelling personal narrative, a number of consulting firms provided key behind-the-scenes support to help drive him to victory.
 
Among these was Lotame Solutions, which collected data and ran microtargeting for Rubio’s campaign. The firm’s not-so-simple task was to create a universe of voters and divide them into three groups: mobilization voters, persuasion voters, and opposition voters. Mobilization voters were Rubio’s hardcore supporters, energized enough not just to vote for him, but to lobby others to do so as well. Persuasion voters were just supportive enough to pull the lever for Rubio. Opposition voters, on the other hand, were dead set against Rubio and were unreceptive to any of the Rubio campaign’s messages.
 
According to Adam Lehman, Lotame’s COO, dividing voters up in this manner required a four-step process: researching and collecting data on the audience; retargeting to establish the audience most receptive to Rubio’s message; using regression analysis to forecast Rubio’s mobilization and persuasion voters; and customizing the campaign’s message for those two distinct groups.
 
“Once we would identify an appropriate audience member, we could put an ad in front of them wherever they might be,” says Lehman. “We developed both analytic tools and technological tools and we were able to extend the audience significantly, which is key for most of these online campaigns—commercial or political.”
 
Doug Pollack, a senior data and business analyst with Lotame, says that the firm made some interesting discoveries about Rubio voters’ personal interests in the process of microtargeting them. “For the mobilization target, we found things like military membership, physical fitness, content sharing, and photography,” says Pollack. “For the persuasion target, independence, art, and automobiles.”
 
The firm then had to put this information into practice. For mobilization voters who enjoyed sharing content, for example, Lotame would place several embeddable links within an ad unit that allowed users to share content geared to their personal rather than political interests.
 
Lehman worked in close concert with the team at Targeted Victory, which was responsible for taking the data that Lotame had collected and putting it to work in a targeting strategy. “We took what Lotame did and put it in terms that consultants and campaign managers could adopt,” says Targeted Victory founder Michael Beach. “If you are paying $10 per every unit of [television] advertising, $5.50 of that is wasted because those people are not receptive to your message at all.”
 
Targeted Victory recently released a Web video publicizing the benefits provided to the Rubio campaign by the firm’s online targeting strategy and  hosts a presentation on its website that outlines the strategies it employed for the Rubio campaign on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and other online venues. By Election Day, Targeted Victory claims that its universe of mobilization and persuasion voters consisted of 5.5 million members—over 45 percent of Florida’s online population.
 
Finally, Targeted Victory worked closely with Something Else Strategies, which was responsible for the Rubio campaign’s general consulting. Malorie Miller, a partner with Something Else Strategies, says that her firm saw immediate results when it implemented the strategy designed by Lotame and Targeted Victory. “We saw an increase in donors, a valuable commodity in any race, but we saw a huge increase when we went up advertising online,” says Miller, adding that there was a noticeable level of traction from the online audience after the campaign implemented a microtargeted strategy, which she attributes to the campaign’s online vendors.
 
“It was a snowball effort,” says Miller. “It definitely increased our audience.”
 Noah Rothman is the online editor at C&E. E-mail him at nrothman@campaignsandelections.com