It is completely legal, and in the modern age even encouraged, to use digital marketing and advertising for political purposes. The second decade of the 21st century saw an astronomical rise in the use of digital marketing and digital advertising for political campaigns. It doesn’t matter if someone’s running for Senator, President, or some other function – digital marketing is always going to ensure that their face is popping up on your computer right before the election.

However, 2020 is regarded as a terrible year by most people (for obvious reasons), but by digital marketing experts especially – and they blame it all on the Presidential Election. This being arguably the most important presidential election of the 21st century, it’s not that staggering just how much Biden’s and Trump’s ads and marketing campaigns enveloped the internet and completely anchored themselves down in all the corners of the internet.

In today’s article, we’ll be taking a look at how digital marketing worked during the election (or rather the time leading up to the election), and how this affected not only the election, but us – as consumers and voters.

Let’s get started!

How Much Money Was Spent?

It’s safe to say that the candidates outdid themselves this year, as they almost tripled the spending of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in 2016. It’s been documented that a major increase in spending has happened in the digital part of the internet.

In 2016 – the candidates accumulated 740 million dollars in spending on digital advertising, while in 2020 (even though the numbers aren’t yet official) – the candidates almost tripled that, amounting to 1.82 billion dollars! Given that the average American home comes at a cost of almost 300 000 dollars, the spending in 2020 amounts to 6 066 homes – to put things in perspective.

It was a good day at Facebook and Google, since most of the money went their way for the ads. This has, without a doubt, impacted digital advertisers on a slightly worrying scale. As the competition intensified in October of last year, the candidates started to push everything they had to get in front of the competition.

However, that’s not the end of this spending barrage – the House and Senate races are also doing quite a lot of spending, and are expected to have spent around $1 billion each, while governor races are expected to exceed a quarter of a billion dollars. It’s also expected that ballot initiatives have spent over 1 billion dollars during this campaign.

The Rise of Digital Marketing in Politics

As we’ve already established, digital marketing in politics really took off at the turn of the decade – as it wasn’t as nearly as present before 2010. 2012 can be defined as the first election year where digital marketing spending has taken a significant role with politics. However, even during that year, a year that saw intense internet rivalry between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, they still only accumulated 78 million dollars on digital marketing and advertising.

If you take a look at this year’s spending, it’s a huge difference and it’s not even nearly the same amount of money. In a space of only 8 years, the candidates increased their spending 23 times.

Before that, only 20 million dollars were spent on digital marketing in 2008, which is actually a decrease from the 2004 campaign, which saw 29 million dollars being spent on digital marketing.

So, how did it get to where it is today? Well, it actually starts with Barack Obama, whose team took advantage of the ever growing power of the internet to mobilize their online voters. A parallel can easily be drawn to John F. Kennedy, who utilized the then-new medium of television – which forever changed the way we’d look at political advertising. Obama’s team pulled the same stunt, only with the internet instead of the television, and it clearly worked.

The three objectives of the campaign were quite clear – build a supporter base, mobilize voters, and persuade undecided voters to vote Obama. When building a base of supporters, they focused on using online advertising to increase sign-ups to the campaign’s email list, get donations and push traffic to their website. Mobilizing voters focused mostly on using online ads for voter registration, early voting, polling, caucus location look-ups, etc. While persuasion focused on using online ads to affect the thinking of voters who were undecided in order to vote Obama.

In 2012, however – the music changed. Parties needed to implement a more advanced system, since digital marketing in political form wasn’t in wraps anymore.

There were four major points that campaign leaders focused on when preparing their digital marketing campaigns. Firstly, their voter targeting became more sophisticated, as campaigns began to match voter files with data from commercial advertising firms that track online behavior, and they managed to draw parallels and track online behavior. This way, they could easily target specific groups of voters – knowing beforehand whether they were wasting their money or not.

Every ad is paid for, and showing an Obama ad to a hardcore republican is usually a waste of money. This way, the campaigns managed to save money.

Secondly, the astronomical rise of social media paved the way for political advertisers to use social media in their advantage. Facebook advertising had reached record amounts (for the time), and the campaigns implemented geo-targeted ads based on user locations to help increase event turnout. It also helped a lot that supporters shared campaign events and content on their social network profiles, predominantly Facebook, which only served as a boost to candidate credibility.

Following that, online video ads started gaining more and more traction. Campaigns started to use overlay advertising on selected videos, pre roll video ads that run before and after select content on news, and also videos embedded in rich media banner advertisements and expandable ads. They only leveraged the data further to deliver their online video advertising.

Lastly, mobile advertising also started to draw a lot of attention to itself as campaigns started to advertise themselves in apps.

The Impact of the Election on Digital and Social Media Advertisers

Your ads are predominantly determined by two things: your budget and your relevance score – and to put it quite frankly, during election campaigns, you’re going to lose on both of those fronts.

Political parties have way too much money (obviously, as it’s seen from the data above) and have experts on their side designing their ads to ensure that they’re always shown.

Let’s explain how this happens. Firstly, regarding your budget – this is not a factor you can affect! Clearly, you don’t have billions of dollars at your disposal for digital marketing, so you’re automatically going to lose when this happens. Political parties are going to bid more and more on the ads they’re showing, which will only cause the prices of other ads to jump (temporarily). This means that you’re going to have to pay more money for the same ad you’ve been paying less for up to now, and it’s only going to get shown less!

This leads us to our second point – relevance score. This is something you can affect, but it requires a really good understanding of how SEO and digital marketing work, not to mention that political parties have huge teams of people dedicated to making this work for them, which in return means that it’s going to work less for you. Since internet territory is limited and is not infinite, everyone who wants to run ads is going to be battling it out.

Your relevance score depends on showing ads to the right people and at the right time. Advertisers with the biggest Ad Rank will win, and that means that they have a good relevance score and a budget. To put it as simply as possible – the more convergence you get (number of people clicking your ads out of the number of people your ads were shown to), the better your relevance score is – which only ensures that your ad placement on the internet will be better and your ads will pop up more often.

This is very similar to major holidays, especially Christmas, when retailers start to increase competition of ad auctions, as it’s crucial for them to challenge ad places on the internet during that time. This also leads to everyone else having a more difficult time placing their ads on the web.

Literature:

https://www.qualityscore.co/us-presidential-elections-hurt-digital-advertisers/

https://www.foundsm.com/blog/how-the-2020-presidential-election-has-impacted-digital-advertising/