The New Media Partnership Looking to Fix Stale Targeting Data

Political ad-intelligence platform Kinetiq Political Insights is teaming up with consumer insights company CivicScience to fix a problem that’s quietly draining campaign ad budgets: stale targeting data.

As third-party cookies disappear and mobile ad IDs get curtailed, political targeting increasingly relies on what the industry calls modeled-on-modeled data – lookalike audiences built from segments that were accurate a cycle or two ago, but have been drifting ever since. KPI projects $10.4 billion in midterm ad spending will run through this decaying targeting infrastructure.

“As an industry, we have to find the right people and we don’t have the benefit of a long tail,” said Mike Adam, a vice president at National Media Insights, one of the firms behind KPI. “We need to find them now. The problem that we’re dealing with too is some of the models that exist can be kind of stale.”

In other words, “political targeting has quietly become a game of telephone,” with campaigns building models off other models until they’re aiming at outdated pictures of the electorate, 

National Media Insights Chief Strategy Officer Adam Wise said in a statement.

That’s where the partnership with CivicScience comes in. The company embeds more than 10,000 always-on survey questions inside publisher content and gathers over 1 million responses daily from a pool of 165 million U.S. consumer profiles. 

That data has typically been used for brand intelligence. But CivicScience Chief Revenue Officer Alex DeSanctis said that his company has already been collecting data on political sentiment for years. Now, that intelligence will actually be available to campaigns.

“We’ve always studied different political issues and behaviors because we like to see how that impacts how consumers shop with different brands,” DeSanctis said. “How are they shopping at Target? How are they shopping at Walmart? How are these issues driving these purchase decisions? We sit on all this really, really robust data about what issues matter to the consumer most.”

“This seemed like a natural extension of our business – to extend it to the political space,” he said. 

With the new partnership, campaigns can also commission custom questions to specific audiences rather than renting static segments. The surveys aren’t actual polls, Adam said. “These are one, two, three question pulse checks. You can ask anything from ‘what kind of car are you driving,’ to ‘what do you think of this local issue?’ ”

KPI already tracks about 1.5 million ad airings daily across more than 1,400 channels and all 210 U.S. media markets pairing each airing with Federal Communications Commission-verified spend, an AI transcript and the actual creative. KPI’s audience model reads voters three ways — declared statements, behavioral signals and social associations — and the partnership with CivicScience strengthens the declared piece specifically, Adam said.

“I think the idea for us is: how do we, as political advertisers, better identify the audiences that matter,” Adam said. “For us, the holy grail is being able to identify a bespoke audience in real time.”