The 2024 U.S. presidential campaign crossed one other milestone this week with the primary televised debate between the 2 candidates. The week before, Vice President Kamala Harris visited rural communities in Georgia to spend time in constituencies largely unfavorable to Democratic candidates. Why spend a lot time in counties Harris won’t likely win?
Extending reach.
“Harris traveled to southern Georgia as a way to lose by less in those areas, to not win,” Rohan Castelino, CMO of adtech platform IRIS.TV told MarTech.
The Harris campaign was mirroring the strategy utilized by Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) during his 2022 reelection campaign. Instead of targeting favorable areas to rally likely supporters, the strategy is to attach with individual voters no matter their location.
In battleground states across the country, campaigns want to extend their reach to win close elections. This means looking beyond the same old geographic and demographic data or constructing off of that data in unconventional ways.
In promoting, for instance, tech partners like IRIS.TV are making it possible for ads to run during programs that slot in deep contextual ways. This helps discover relevant programs and other content beyond obvious categories like news coverage.
Growing reach contextually
Contextual targeting helps brands, too. When ads saturate TV and digital channels in the course of the holiday rush, contextual targeting identifies relevant inventory where competitors may not be looking.
“Traditionally, people would have a look at endemic categories — if it’s a sports brand, let’s goal sports,” Castelino explained. “But what we’re seeing is that if you’re capable of understand, at a person asset level, what the content is about, you possibly can map on the first-party data profiles of your customers.”
A Carl’s Jr. campaign this yr used IRIS.TV-enabled contextual data mapped on the restaurant chain’s first-party data. The company targeted its campaign by geography and the apparent food category, but then it went into other less-obvious categories like gaming. The campaign delivered 35% incremental lift on visits to stores and 152% incremental sales lift, in accordance with IRIS.
Deterministic household data that ensures the suitable person is in front of the ad doesn’t guarantee they’ll find it interesting. Matching ads to the suitable viewing moments relies on context. A study by AVCA (Alliance for Video-Level Contextual Advertising) and eye-tracking technology Tobii showed 42% of viewers were more desirous about brands and products from contextually aligned ads than from ads that weren’t aligned.
IRIS.TV uses AI tech partners to achieve additional understanding of individual episodes and content to categorize and rate them for advertisers. If a brand desires to avoid violent or risqué content, those highly charged moments are tagged and may be avoided. If a political campaign has a message on women’s issues, it could possibly find relevant situations in a TV drama or comedy and run ads against that. Thirty-eight percent of viewers learned more from ads shown in AI-enabled contextual environments than from ads not contextually placed, in accordance with the identical AVCA/Tobii study.
Plenty of CTV for holiday campaigns (in non-battleground locations)
Due to Harris’ late entry into the national race, her campaign is spending big to catch up. However, the Harris campaign’s use of digital video won’t affect most holiday advertisers — especially those that planned and aren’t caught in battleground areas.
“After the move to Harris, we’re hearing that they’re pushing more of their $200M campaign budget to digital streaming platforms like Hulu, Roku and YouTube to grab the eye of a younger demographic,” said Dan Larkman, CEO and founder at CTV and programmatic company Keynes Digital. “In terms of our business and the performance for our clients, this is just not projected to impose any major spikes in price or lack of performance on our client campaigns as we locked in a big volume of CTV PMPs for Q4 already and don’t depend on YouTube inventory.”
A big proportion of Keynes Digital’s clients upping spend for the vacations “based on increased channel opportunities and performance,” Larkman said.
The impact of the political season on streaming campaigns is comparatively small. Political campaigns, on the entire, are split 75%/25% in linear and broadcast TV over CTV. Key battleground cities represent only 7% of total CTV spend at Keynes Digital, said Larkman.
According to IAB, 89% of ad sellers, including publishers, platforms and adtech partners, increased ad inventory within the politics category, in the event that they had that category available. Eight-six percent experienced a rise in demand for political ads in comparison with the last presidential cycle. And since Harris entered the race, the overwhelming majority of ad sellers have seen increases in political ad demand on the national (91%) and native (75%) levels.
Dig deeper: Brands have options when breaking through the political noise
Placing Taylor Swift’s endorsement in context
Contextual relevance got a large boost within the Harris campaign this week when Taylor Swift announced her endorsement on Instagram. The pop star’s IG has 283 million followers.
Early evidence shows the endorsement boosted interest across digital channels about issues related to the 2024 race present in Swift’s sphere of influence. Mentions of Harris skyrocketed in Taylor Swift-related discussions within the hours after the endorsement, while discussions about Harris’ opponent, former President Donald Trump, declined.
These mentioned were measured by the digital discovery platform Nexxen across web, TV and social media.
Connecting with customers around their passions will help brands and political campaigns alike find common ground on other issues relevant to each parties.
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