Democratic Digital Advertising

Whether you’re running for your local school board or the U.S. Senate, social media will likely be a prong of your political digital campaign strategy. Strong digital campaigns meet people where they are online, and the numbers don’t lie—social media remains an omnipresent force in our world, with more than half of the global population projected to use social platforms by mid-2020.

Whether you are working on a political or advocacy campaign, a digital campaign will likely be a major part of your communications budget. If executed well, digital—from organic social media posts to programmatic advertising—gives you the ability to communicate with voters that you never could otherwise reach, and to hyper-target ads to specific lists or segments of voters.

Native ads have become popular over the past few years, but can you use them for political campaign ads?

While digital advertising is always in flux, in the past two years and even the last few months there have been a whirlwind of changes for political campaign ads and it’s caused some uncertainty in the industry. While we don’t have a crystal ball to see into the future of political advertising online, there are some pretty sure bets you’ll want to keep an eye on a couple of trends in 2020. Read on below to find out what we’ll be watching carefully in 2020.

We often find that a digital advocacy campaign is expected to meet multiple organizational goals at once. Unfortunately, you can’t really have it all. So how do you choose an objective and what digital strategy is likely to achieve it?

The art of crafting a well-integrated advocacy strategy is akin to making a great book-to-film adaptation. When you find out a book you love will be made into a movie, you hope the story, characters, and message won’t be lost in translation across mediums. A good adaptation will capture the theme and boil the plotline down to its most important elements—after all, few among us have time to catch a twelve-hour movie (though I personally would be on board with a marathon re-cut of The Shining).

Digital political ad transparency has been an elusive thing. In a world of fake news, hacked sites and independent expenditures from groups you have never heard of, actionable information on digital spending is important. For years, you have been able to find out what opponents are spending on television and radio. Now, digital publishers a re starting to focus on  digital ad transparency. They are making it easier to see what folks are doing with paid digital political ads.