Let’s Talk Politics

Transcript Hello, and Welcome to The Simpli.fi Webinar Series. I’m David McBee, Simpli.fi’s Director of Training. thanks for joining us on the second Monday of each month for industry news, interviews, product roll-outs and training on all things related to targeted advertising and connected TV. And if you miss us live, you can visit the webinars page of our website or request access to Bullseye, our learning management platform, for all of our previously recorded episodes and other valuable resources. It’s March 2022 and this month we’re talking politics. Specifically, how Simpli.fi can be a valuable resource for political advertisers. Why politics? According to a recent eMarketer study, “U.S. political advertisers will splash out $8.8 billion on video in 2022, close to the record $9.5 billion spent in 2020, despite this year marking a midterm rather than presidential election.” Over the course of this webinar, you will learn exactly how Simpli.fi is prepared to handle this upcoming surge in political ad spend. INTEGRATIONS WITH POLITICAL DATA PROVIDERS Starting with our active Integrations with Leading Political Data Providers. We’ve partnered with each of these leading data providers: Acxiom, The Data Trust, L2, Aristotle, i360, and TargetSmart, as well as many others: These partnerships allow us to onboard their audience data at the address-level. Whether you have previously purchased the data, or you’d like Simpli.fi to purchase on your behalf, our platform can target these political audiences at the household-level. If working with a specific data provider matters to you, we can do so with precision and scale. LEADING MATCH RATE We’ve built our platform to handle a high volume of political campaigns with success. And that starts with our leading match rate for address data. Whether identified in your CRM, via a Political Data Provider agreement, or from an address list curated by Simpli.fi, we can target at the household-level with a consistent match rate at or above 90% – you heard me correctly – our match rate normally exceeds 90% of the address lists we ingest. That means we can reach more of your candidate’s audience than ever before and at no additional cost. This massive benefit provides greater reach, greater scale, and much less of the audience list going to waste. MANAGED AND SELF-SERVICE OPTIONS Additionally, we offer managed and self-service options to promote ease of workflow. Managed service means Simpli.fi manages the setup, launch, reporting, and optimizations. Whereas, our self-service model allows for a fully-automated platform-level workflow. We provide the choice for how our clients work with us, while still sharing all the benefits of our platform. SPEED & AGILITY Another element that is important to political advertisers, is of course, speed. That’s why we’ve created a dedicated politically-specialized service team. This team accelerates tasks with a high level of accuracy. With expedited response times, we can turnaround a high volume of tasks in a small manner of time. What kinds of expedited response times? During political season, our managed service clients can expect creative approval within approximately 2 hours, and campaigns submitted before noon will be activated that day. Self-service clients can expect a 2-hour turnaround time for approved campaigns submitted between 9am and 6pm central and a 4-hour turnaround time for campaigns submitted after business hours. The agility of our customer support team also means that we are quick to respond to campaign updates and changes. Consider a case where the outcome of an election is hinging on the results of a particular district or state. You may not have 3 to 5 days for your changes to be implemented. The election might be over by then. Our team can very quickly add budget to a campaign. Or we can target a new list, a new geography or update the ad message as necessary. In a tight election, these kinds of updates can make a difference right up until the day before an election so we’ve built our team to be nimble and responsive. ANY CREATIVE, ANY DEVICE, ACROSS HIGH QUALITY INVENTORY We can activate address data to target people using any creative on any device, delivered across high-quality inventory. We’re talking about connected TV commercials, online video, desktop and mobile display, native and social ads, and audio. This allows an advertiser to get in front of potential voters through a wide variety of device types. And each media type runs as its own tactic, providing a transparent view of spend and performance. As for where ads are delivered, Simpli.fi is actively curating the highest quality inventory available. As you can see here, we deliver on thousands of websites, mobile apps and across several CTV Networks. ADDITIONAL AUDIENCE TARGETING As previously mentioned, we believe that our Integrations with Leading Political Data Providers paired with our 90% match rate makes Simpli.fi a superior choice for political advertisers. Obviously, the ability to work with and target nearly all of the addresses on those lists is vital to many political advertisers. Still, Simpli.fi’s political story is incomplete without a conversation about some of the additional benefit that are applicable to political campaigns. BEHAVIORAL TARGETING Beyond address lists, Simpli.fi has the unique ability to leverage behavioral data, creating a custom audience that can target individuals based on their online activity, specifically the keywords they search and the content they read. This allows your candidate to target potential voters based on the issues. Imagine for a moment that you’re working with a candidate whose platform is all about renewable energy. Simpli.fi can target individuals whose online search activity includes keywords like solar panels, wind energy, hybrids, EVs, recycling, and so on. As people surf the web using these keywords, or they read online content that includes these keywords, they can be added to an audience that we can target with the candidate’s message. Simpli.fi’s platform retains the date and timestamp associated with every piece of data we gather and can target with variable recency from instantly up to 30 days after the event. In fact, 50% of the ads we serve use a data point that is less than 24 hours old. That means that half of our ads are delivered to individual who exhibit the behavior that warrants their inclusion as part of the target audience the same day they are doing their research. As for the other half, those ads are normally delivered the next day or over the next few days. Or said another way, we can show your candidate’s ads to potential voters based on the issues that are relevant to their campaign and we can do it quickly, while those issues are top of mind. LOCATION & EVENT TARGETING Next, let’s talk about location and event targeting. Would it be beneficial to deliver your candidate’s ads to people who attend political rallies or possibly events that take place at a union hall for example? Simpli.fi can use our precise geo-fencing technology to capture devices at a specific location at a pre-defined date and time, and then later show your candidate’s message to a percentage of the people who attended the event. HOUSEHOLD DEMOGRAPHIC TARGETING We know that a great deal of the political advertising that takes place leverages the lists provided by the Leading Political Data Providers that we mentioned before. Acxiom, The Data Trust, L2, Aristotle, i360, and TargetSmart are leaders in this space and why we chose to partner with them. If there’s a case where you want to target households based on other demographics or interests, Simpli.fi can curate and target additional lists. We can, of course, target republicans, democrats and independents. And here are some other interesting audience demos that might be attractive to some candidates: individuals who have voted in the past, veterans, people who read world news, people who read religious content, political contributors: conservative or liberal. We can also target by net worth, household income, age, level of education and over 500 additional variables. GEO-TARGETING Another benefit that Simpli.fi provides is the ability deliver ads within specific geographic boundaries. Traditional media often targets areas that are larger, often much larger, than is necessary. This often means wasted ads on individuals who can’t even vote in your candidate’s election. Simpli.fi can target areas as small as specific neighborhoods, zip codes, or congressional districts. Take a metro area that borders the state line, Kansas City for example. Individuals who live on the Kansas side of the state line often see ads for politicians who are running in Missouri. Those are wasted impressions and wasted budget. Using Simpli.fi’s geo-targeting, not only can politicians target one state or the other (even when DMAs cross state lines), they can even target specific congressional districts. REPORTING I’d like to shift gears and talk about reporting. We know that reach is an incredibly relevant metric when it comes to political advertising. To that end, Simpli.fi can report number of impressions delivered and to how many devices those ads were delivered. But that’s really just the beginning of that story. CONVERSIONS For candidates who would like to track conversion metrics, we have the ability to report both online and offline conversions. Online conversions are tracked when a person to whom we delivered your candidate’s ad visits their website. We can even measure form completions, signed petitions or online donations. Offline conversions are tracked when we build geo-fences around voting locations, allowing us to report how many voters to whom we delivered your candidate’s ad, came to the locations on the day of the vote. Conversion reports can be run at the Zip+4 level, providing actionable data and insights. And device-level delivery and performance reporting is even available on CTV campaigns RECAP Before I let you go, let’s quickly recap the ways that Simpli.fi can be a valuable asset for political advertisers. 1. Integrations with leading data providers: Acxiom, The Data Trust, L2, Aristotle, i360, and TargetSmart, as well as many others. 2. Our match rate normally exceeds 90% of the address lists we ingest. We reach more of your candidate’s audience than ever before and less of their list goes to waste. 3. Managed and self-service options to fit your needs. 4. A politically-specialized service team that accelerates tasks with a high level of accuracy at expedited response times. Political campaigns go live within a day and often even the same-day. 5. Any creative on any device, delivered across high quality inventory. Connected TV commercials, online video, display, native and audio ads delivered on Connected TVs, desktop and laptop computers, tablets and mobile devices delivered on thousands of websites, mobile apps and across several CTV Networks. 6. Additional audiences. Target voters based on a. their online keyword searches and content consumption. b. their location data – i.e. individuals who attend political rallies or union halls for example. c. demographic data like political affiliation, age, education, income, net worth and other interests. d. and any third-party address list. 7. Geo-targeting by DMA, zip codes, counties, states, and congressional districts. 8. Granular and transparent reporting – including number of impressions and to how many devices those ads were delivered, online and offline conversions and device level reporting All in all, we feel that Simpli.fi is an excellent choice for political advertisers and we’re eager to implement these strategies to help your candidates win their next election. Thanks for joining me today. If you have questions about Simpli.fi’s offerings, please reach out to your Simpli.fi account manager or send an email to hi@simpli.fi. If you have questions about training, please send them to training@simpli.fi. A copy of this webinar recording, along with the deck and a complete transcript will be available in Bullseye, as well as on Simpli.fi’s website at simpli.fi/webinars. Please join us on the second Monday of each month for The Simpli.fi Webinar Series. I’m David McBee, Director of Training. Be Awesome and I’ll see ya next time.