Digital Campaigning

Cookie targeting and online ads.

Based on the hype we hear, you can run your campaign with no volunteers and a staff of one: a clever twentysomething armed with an iPad and the candidate's credit card. You've probably heard the pitch: He can develop full profiles on everyone in your voter database, based on their browsing history and Facebook data, which will enable you the candidate to reach tens of thousands of voters in the most effective manner ever imagined, by displaying your ads on their browser pages and Facebook views.

Or so we're told.

The technology certainly exists (and demonstrates itself every time an ad for tennis shoes pops up after you've shopped for a pair online).

When you hear the word "targeted" in the same sentence as "online advertising", think of it as a shotgun blast instead of a rifle shot: some of the pattern will hit the bulls-eyebut many more pellets will hit outside the target.

Impersonal

If your goal is to reach likely voters in a personal manner, you can't do it with an online display ad. At least when someone sees a lawn sign in the neighborhood, it carries the implicit endorsement of the homeowner.

Fraud is rampant. . .

About 40 percent of clicks and page views are assumed to be generated by "botnets" and "click farms" designed to generate revenue for the ad exchanges and website owners; saavy advertisers simply "price in" the cost of this, and you should to.

. . . and so are ad-blockers

Estimates vary but industry studies indicate that about a third of internet users employ some sort of ad-blocking software. And that number will continue to rise, in part because ad blockers are now common on mobile devices, which originate 58 percent of all web searches.

Difficult to quantify

If your campaign is well-crafted you will indeed narrow your focus to those who are receptive to your message. But how many? And how many times did they even see see your quarter-cent ad? We read one study that says half of the ads don't even appear because of the thousands of variant screen sizes and configurations (and the increasing use of ad-blocking software).

When the candidate's banner appears on a billboard or a city bus, the cost is fixed. In the digital world, the cost is ongoing: you pay for "page views" (every time it appears on someone's browser page) and "click-throughs" (whenever someone actually clicks on the ad to view another linked site, presumably the campaign website.) These costs can grow. Rapidly. Exponentially.

They're similar to cable-TV location "nodes". And they don't resolve the issue of mobile devices and laptops, which move around. Which means the "footprint" of your advertising might miss significant parts of your district, or conversely leave you advertising to tens of thousands nonvoters. If you're told you ad will reach everyone in the county who browses the internet, the statement might be true but it might require reaching half the computers in four or five surrounding counties, as well as thousands of mobile devices that were just passing through when their location was recorded.

Easier for Democrats

That's because Democrat voters tend to be concentrated in urban areas, which means that targeting them is more cost-effective.