Washington: Commuters on the sea-hugging Montauk line of the Long Island Rail Road had a shared experience while browsing the internet on their smartphones recently: A half-screen ad popped up attacking Rep. Timothy H. Bishop as “one of Congress’s most corrupt” members.
Yet some might have already seen Bishop — a Democrat facing Republican challenger Lee Zeldin in New York’s 1st Congressional District — in another ad attacking him had they perused YouTube that morning. The familiar face may have also greeted them at work, where they would have viewed anti-Bishop display ads while browsing news sites. And there he was again on their phones on the way home, even as they crossed in and out of their congressional district.
The digital track and chase in eastern Long Island — part of the National Republican Congressional Committee’s effort to catch up with Democrats’ sophisticated voter targeting — is an integral part of the modern ground game. Now campaigns know where you eat, what you watch, what you read, where you work, if you commute — and are tracking it in real time, delivering specifically tailored messages to individual voters and hounding them until the ballots are cast.
And in an election cycle with so many close races, the outcome, with control of Congress at stake, may turn on which party does the better job of, in effect, engineering the vote.
The use of this technology is not without risk. Its relentless and intrusive nature can quickly turn off voters, even though campaigns and committees on both sides work to address privacy concerns by making sure that, at the individual level, each targeted voter remains anonymous.
“If you’re going to do this incredibly specific and intrusive form of advertising, the way you can make it successful is by making it feel less like advertising,” said Catherine Tucker, a professor from the Sloan School of Management at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “You’re sacrificing the pushiness. It has to feel like a conversation.”
The National Republican Congressional Committee offered an exclusive look at its efforts in the 2014 cycle, which at its core features the ability to track and target a voter not just across all devices but also across voters’ daily routines. The Democrats’ own operation is churning as well, but it is the Republicans who feel they have more to prove.
The strategy hits voters with an arc, intended to move them from potentially undecided voters to guaranteed Republican voters. First, a voter will see a series of persuasion ads, with the substance of the message progressing only after the voter has seen the previous ad in the sequence. Then, the committee moves to its “get out the vote” phase, like urging someone who has not requested a ballot to do so.
The process starts when the committee ships its voter file, full of personal contact and political information, to LiveRamp, a data computing company in San Francisco. LiveRamp then matches voters with digital identifiers, browser cookies and mobile IDs; strips the identifying information from the file; and ships the list back to the committee.
With that, the Republican committee staff can target a unique mobile ID — reaching an individual smartphone or tablet that is, for example, owned by someone over 65 who has requested an absentee ballot and is a registered Republican who has voted in the past three election cycles. The only thing they don’t know, again for reasons of privacy, is the name of the device’s owner.
This technology is fairly new in both politics and the private sector. Democrats and Republicans have made gains this cycle, in part by creating new workarounds to reach voters at a more micro level.
“While we know a bit more, the ability to target and drill down has gotten so much better, it’s like the 2012 data capabilities on steroids,” said Zac Moffatt, the founder of Targeted Victory, a right-leaning political technology firm.
And while Democrats are certainly making advances in digital targeting, those on the Republican side are perhaps more notable — if only because they had much farther to climb.
In a sign of its seriousness about digital outreach, the NRCC said it was devoting almost $5 million (Dh18.36 million) solely for buying digital ads. It also created 90 websites for 20 different races in just over two months, all designed to allow for changes in both messages and media without remaking the site.
The House Republican campaign committee effort is buttressed by a Senate version and by firms like the one founded by Moffatt, who was Mitt Romney’s digital director. Targeted Victory is providing targeting technologies to campaigns large and small, from Senate contests like Joni Ernst’s bid in Iowa to a county recorder race in Jasper County, Missouri.
Targeted Victory’s approach is similar to that of the NRCC, while also offering self-service options through its Targeted Engagement programme. Clients can go online to upload their own ad, choose the group of voters they want to target, choose the cable time slot or online audience they want, and check out — much like on Amazon. Then, the targeted campaign begins.
“It’s duplicating what we do offline with door knocks and phone calls,” Moffatt said, but at a lower cost with a bigger scale. “One is to pull you in, and one is the chase programme.”
There are more players in the digital field because the cost has dropped. Once reserved for campaigns with billion-dollar budgets, the ubiquity of new technologies and an expanded availability of data have made these efforts available to nearly all comers. Targeted Victory’s minimum budget requirement is $500.
The weakness of the Republican digital and data effort during the 2012 cycle, which lagged behind the Democrats in many respects, was described by operatives on both sides as better suited for the 20th century, having failed to take advantage of advances in data and technology.
On the other side, the Democratic-friendly digital firm NGP VAN, for example, has many similar “Silicon Valley meets shoe-leather” tools in its Action Centre programme, as described by its chief executive, Stu Trevelyan. It also has turned some of its behavioural real-time tracking into a game of sorts, awarding points to people who complete tasks like messaging friends on Facebook about a campaign.
And while the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has also been using mobile microtargeting programmes, as well as working with Google AdWords to target ads geographically, its record-breaking fund-raising is perhaps most impressive. The Democratic committee’s fund-raising has outpaced the Republican committee’s by nearly $41 million so far and was powered by a dedicated email campaign.
At the end of the day, said Chris Georgia, deputy digital director for the NRCC, all of the data and analytics advances basically come to down better targeting their key voters.
“We bought you — not a website,” he said.
