Blog Category: Data
It was just a few years back that political campaigns and consultants were reluctant to discuss their use of voter file data and other data sets to target online ads. This election season it’s a hot topic, and today the biggest online ad industry trade group is touting the practice. The Interactive Advertising Bureau, which has lobbied against proposed privacy bills that could impede data-driven ad targeting, wants to ensure that legislators understand how important microtargeting has become to the political campaigns that help them get elected…
Even Aristotle, a firm that was near impossible to contact regarding the subject six years ago, is more than willing to speak on record about it now. “It’s a competitive market, and the politics has gotten more competitive,” said John Aristotle Phillips, CEO of Aristotle, in July when discussing his firm’s relationship with Intermarkets. “It would be natural, you’d assume the competition and the people providing tools to these hyper competitive campaigns would also be competitive themselves.”
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Both Intermarkets and CampaignGrid enable advertisers to target digital ads based on publicly-available national voter file data. Intermarkets partners with data powerhouse Aristotle to aim ads based on party affiliation and degree of voter activity in addition to information such as demographic info on gender and household income levels, and psychographic information.
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For campaigns, the key to successfully using big data is to make it small, says John Aristotle Phillips, CEO of leading political data provider Aristotle. “The perception is that big data means massive broadcasting of political messages, but in fact it’s exactly the opposite,” he says. “Big data enables very precise narrowcasting of messages to target individual voters. That also enables one-on-one communication, and you’re more likely to get a response from a targeted voter.”
As big data and the tools to use it become more available and affordable, the technology no longer is the purview of wealthy campaigns. “Big data and mobile campaigning tools are revolutionizing the way campaigns are being won, and it’s a serious challenge to party hierarchy,” says Phillips. “You can be a candidate without party support and topple the party’s nominee.”
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Partnering with voter data firms has become a trend among digital ad companies hoping to tap the political market. Intermarkets thinks partnering with a veteran in the sector – Aristotle – is the right way to go, and now it’s tacked on a relationship with digital ad data management firm Lotame to put Aristotle’s data to work for political clients.
“We’re in the process of building out our cookie pool and migrating the [Aristotle] data,” said Mike Loy, chief managing officer at Intermarkets, a digital ad firm and ad sales rep for web publishers like Drudge Report. Part of that process involves segmenting online audiences into groups political advertisers want to target. The Aristotle relationship is exclusive, and it’s the first time the political data giant has partnered to enable online ad targeting, said Loy.
The issue of mammoth “super PAC” spending on political advertising has already dominated the election cycle. But potential voters may be seeing even more advertising because one company that tailors online advertisements to users — known as microtargeting — wants to lower the overall cost.
On Monday, Aristotle, a company that provides data for online political advertising, and Intermarkets, a digital advertising company that works with sites like Drudge Report and anncoulter.com, will announce an exclusive partnership…
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Washington, DC (June 14, 2012) —Aristotle International, the leading nonpartisan political technology and data provider in the U.S., today announced a contract award from Lockheed Martin Desktop Solutions Inc. (DSI) for constituent contact and demographic data for federal, state and local government elected offices. The data will be integrated with CRM technologies that support constituent services.
Lockheed Martin DSI is the premier provider of correspondence and technology services to the House of Representatives. More than 350 Members of Congress and more than 20 governors as well as multiple state legislatures and leading municipalities use Lockheed Martin DSI for their constituent correspondence, workflow and casework management.
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Donations by text valuable for organizing, fundraising
“John Aristotle Phillips, CEO of Aristotle, an organization that helps campaigns organize donations by text, says savvy campaigns will benefit not just by raising money, but by spinning donor relationships into a broader network. Of text donations, Phillips says,”It’s helpful to the campaign. It’s not just the money, it’s the indication of support.” Phillips explains that large numbers of small donors will help establish a network campaigns can rely on. This election cycle, he says, donations by text “might be unsurpassed” as an organizing tool.“
In 2009, David Binetti, a Web entrepreneur who helped build the federal government’s Web portal USA.gov, began collecting the voter registration records of 200 million Americans. The data—from several hundred state, county, and city registrars—made for an unholy collection of obsolete file formats, from floppy disks to an 18-inch roll of magnetic tape made for a 1951 UNIVAC mainframe. Binetti and his staff spent two years loading all of it into a searchable, sortable database that’s 1,000 gigabytes large. That was the first massive step in building Votizen, a website with the not-so-modest goal of coining “a new political currency based on voter-to-voter connections…”
Campaigns already recruit supporters and volunteers through social networks. For candidates to justify another micro-targeting expense, Votizen will have to recruit a critical mass of the most well-connected voters. So far, it claims 40,000 users who have tried to nudge at least some of their 1.3 million voting friends. Binetti says he hasn’t settled on the fees he plans to charge for access to them. The site’s survival will come down to “how much does it cost them to recruit the supporter and how much can they mark that up when they sell the supporter to the candidate,” says John Aristotle Phillips, co-founder of Aristotle, a political data mining shop that works for Republicans and Democrats…
Would Aristotle’s precision voter records with emails help you achieve your grassroots goals?
Contact Rob Christ, EVP Professional Services, Mergers & Acquisitions, for a quick assessment.
In the 2008 presidential race, Barack Obama was famously effective in using new technologies to raise money, mobilize voters and target his message of change.
In this year’s campaign, his opponents are determined to turn the tables.
Republican political operatives, some with deep financial backing from the billionaire Koch brothers and others, are unleashing about a half dozen major projects that take advantage of advanced database technologies to manage campaigns and target voters with personalized messages…
