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Is Premium Inventory Worth The Price In Public Affairs Campaigns?

Public affairs campaigns have a tendency to over-index to particular media outlets such as insider political publications and national news. But is the price of these premium ad placements worth the cost? In most instances, we believe the answer is no, and in today's short read we show you why.

Average Prices Obscure Actual Prices

Let's first understand what it means when you hear the price of an ad. If, for example, you're paying a $4 CPM for display ads, that means you're being charged a fixed, $4 for every 1,000 impressions of the ad. CPM is a standard metric used in advertising that stands for Cost Per Mille, "mille" being the Latin word for thousand.

In programmatic advertising, those ads are running across hundreds, or even thousands of publishers. And those publishers charge the ad platform you're working on wildly different prices for their particular ad inventory. So the actual price of an ad to your platform on The New York Times will be orders of magnitude higher than the price of an ad on a local news outlet. But your ad platform averages all of those prices together and charges you a fixed $4 CPM. 

There's nothing wrong with this approach. In fact it simplifies the planning and purchasing process for most campaigns. But if you ask your ad platform to guarantee a certain percentage of placements on premium sites, your CPM will go up, because you have restricted the platform's ability to average its costs. In plain english, this means that assuming your budget stays the same, the decision-makers you are trying to reach will see the ads less times if you insist on premium inventory. So you get one ad on The New York Times, instead of multiple ads on different publishers.

Is There Something Better About Premium Inventory?

But is it worth it to pay more to make a splash on the premium outlets? To answer that question, let's be very precise about what we're trying to do in public affairs campaigns.  

Our view is that the goal is not to create recall as in other forms of advertising.

In fact we'd argue that the goal is not necessarily even to persuade politicians of the merits of your point. This is the classic flaw of public affairs campaigns in general—the naive belief that if you simply convince politicians you're right, they will do what you want.  

Policy may be part of the calculus when a politician goes to vote, but politics will usually have the final say. So we believe the precise goal of a public affairs campaign is to tip the balance of the politics. And to move the politics, you must put yourself in the politician's shoes.

A politician knows that her constituents do not read insider political publications. In fact most of them don't even read The New York Times, and the few who do are almost never persuadable voters. So the politician will be largely unmoved by seeing an ad in these media outlets, because they won't think their key constituents are being moved by it either.

Where will the politician be concerned about seeing the ad? Connected TV, local print outlets, local TV outlets, lifestyle sites, sports coverage, and the countless other places that ordinary voters spend their time. And all of these media outlets have the extra virtue of being far less expensive than the premium sites. So not only do you get more ads, but you get ads that move the politics more.

We're not suggesting to ignore insider publications and national news entirely. There's a role for advertising in these outlets to drive the conversation among insiders, and to secure ad inventory for your particular targets who may themselves over-index on these sites.

But in our work, we find policy-makers and their influencers on a wide variety of sites beyond just political news. During one legislative session last summer we regularly found ad inventory for our targets on a hydration reminder app. 

Our favorite example comes from one recent high-pitched legislative session where a substantial number of our targets were frequently checking a blood pressure app. So we advertised there, which may not have helped their blood pressure.

So to summarize— focus on the targets, not the media outlets. If you've correctly isolated your targets, the best practice is to reach them wherever they are online. With this approach you'll get both more ads, and ads that better drive the politics.

Three Ways To Operationalize This Email

🔱  Check your browsing history and see the full list of domains you've recently visited. You're a political insider or you wouldn't be reading this. Are those domains all political sites?

🔱  Review the most recent domain report in your last campaign to see if it contains a mix of local, lifestyle, and national publishers. 

🔱  Focus your next campaign on reaching the targets, not particular media outlets.

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🔱  If you'd like to learn more about the different price points for various types of ad inventory, contact us today.