The promise of programmatic digital advertising in 2024 has collided with the hard reality of signal loss. Or as one media practitioner put it: an “increasing lack of addressability of impressions.”
Now, a GOP media buying shop is looking to help clients alleviate the targeting headache that comes with the breakdown between voter file and third-party data and media buys aiming to hit a narrow slice of the electorate.
To help guide its clients’ ad buys down the stretch, National Media Research, Planning & Placement has unveiled a contextual targeting offering — something it’s been using internally, but is now publicizing to help drive adoption as a potential standalone vertical.
The offering, officially unveiled this week, is a partnership with contextual-targeting provider Semasio to help campaigns reach previously “unreachable swing voters based on their real-time engagement and sentiment on key issues.”
Adam Wise, chief innovation officer at National Media Research, Planning & Placement, cited data to explain how the offering works. He noted that an average voter visits 540 websites in a given month, which can provide 70,000 data points.
“What we’ve been able to do is track the title of the story [that they’re reading], where they’re reading that … and use AI to process the entire content of the story and create essentially a word cloud on everybody,” he said, adding that it’s still privacy compliant.
The voter’s “media ecology” is then paired with proprietary survey data. “What we’re doing is taking live polling data from pollsters, like actual honest to God live calls to real people saying to pollsters that they are a persuadable voter, and then we’re matching that online to what they’re reading,” said Wise.
It beats relying on third-party consumer data like credit scores or car purchases, he added. “We’re now talking about a modeling solution that gives us higher granularity, higher prescriptive, more sensitive models. And not only that, it has zero loss because there’s no onboarding.
“It’s scoring every device ID and internet [connection]. So we’re able to go in and say, Trade Desk or Basis or any number of DSPs, we’re scoring from one to 10 every device ID that exists in the DSP from how persuadable they’re — so there’s zero loss that has accrued traditional onboarding of offline data.
Wise said that this methodology creates “more scale with higher fidelity audiences — especially at a time in which the ability to match voter files online impression is decreasing.”
Wise believes the service will be particularly valuable for clients in an election cycle with so few perusable voters. “If you look at the data, 36 percent of the persuadable voters, the impressions available with these audiences aren’t available through offline targeting.”
What’s happening now to campaigns, he said, is the deluge of media spending is leading to “less reach and higher frequency.”
“If an advertiser isn’t doing broader based behavioral targeting, they’re really missing out on a lot of people that they need to be talking to,” he said. “Especially when you look at 25 to 55 year olds that we need to be trying to persuade, they’re massively under indexed.
“You look at our Hispanic audiences, they’re massively under profile for Experian, TransUnion, LiveRamp. A lot of the key people we need to be talking to are being missed. This also gives us a tool to talk to voters in a different way.”
