In the weeks following an election cycle, campaigns and pundits conduct exhaustive post-mortems to better understand what made the difference between winning and losing efforts.
In 2022, representatives across the country will seek to learn from 2021’s state and local elections. Will campaign spending continue to increase? Could polling misses, like those that took place in New Jersey and Virginia, be avoided this year? And how can candidates reach new voters in a hyper-partisan media environment?
With hundreds of races at stake in Congressional midterm elections, campaign professionals must ensure that their candidates are taking advantage of the most advanced strategies and technologies.
In both 2008, 2012 and 2016, the campaigns of Barack Obama and Donald Trump touted their use of data and analysis to identify potential voters and drive them to the polls. In every election cycle, new tools are tested and deployed in an effort to provide a competitive advantage to a certain candidate or interest group.
For those tasked with planning advertisements for an election campaign or ballot initiative, the ability to quickly identify and deploy the best tools can make a huge difference in a cutthroat, zero-sum space. These are the same tools and tactics that marketers can draw upon to win after the campaign season as well.
While political campaigns increase their use of data analysis and targeting, a parallel transformation is taking place in entertainment and marketing. Ten years ago, the most effective way to reach American voters was through advertising on linear TV; today, a proliferation of OTT options and streaming services has led to fragmentation of premium audiences. How can a campaign know what their voters are watching and how to reach them?
The tectonic shift in TV and premium video has made life more complicated for political advertisers but it has also offered new opportunities for success.
With the right strategies for targeting and measurement, political campaigns can achieve a more granular level of detail when communicating with their voters and encouraging them to go to the polls. Real-time feedback can help campaigns to refine their messaging and improve their agility when specific tactics are falling short.
As candidates—and marketers—increase their investments in CTV, they can learn from what has worked in this past election and focus on these three key areas to gain a competitive advantage:
CTV promises to hold an important position in campaigns for the next Congressional and Presidential election cycles, with ad-supported streaming services offering the opportunity to reach potential voters across the country.
Taking a dedicated, strategic approach to this key medium can help to develop better ads for candidates and deliver more relevant ads to viewers. The sum result of these efforts could just be enough to send a candidate to Washington—or to steal share from a key competitor.