What a Presidential Campaign Can Learn From a Used Car Dealer

The constant theme of this newsletter is that the best ideas in ad technology usually come first to the commercial sector, and are slow to come to politics. There are many reasons for this that we will continue to unpack in these short reads. This week we focus on a particularly jarring contrast between the sophistication of digital advertising used by even small businesses versus the most well-funded national campaigns.

🔱   Target Zones and Conversion Zones

Imagine you're a local used car dealer. Your primary objective in advertising is to get people onto your lot so your sales team can work their magic. Where do you find local people in the market for cars? Certainly there's many ways to do this online. But the most precise place to find your targets is identifying who is visiting your competitors' car lots. So you do the following:

• You geo-fence your competitors' car lots—The Target Zone.
• You advertise to people visiting those competitor lots across all of their devices.
• Then you track the mobile signals of people captured in the Target Zone, and measure if your ads get them to visit your lot—The Conversion Zone.

This is a tried and true tactic relied on by thousands of small to large businesses across the country. Car dealers of all sizes use it. Big box retailers use it. Even burger joints use it.

They use it because it works. And it provides an extremely precise measure of the impact of your ads in converting customers.

🔱   How Zones Apply To Politics

So how might this concept apply to politics?

Take this example. You're running a campaign in an early voting state like Pennsylvania. Your goal is to get college students to return their ballots at an early voting location. Here's what you'd do:

• You geo-fence the dorms (Target Zone) 
• You deliver multiple ads to your targets across all of their devices
• Then you track your targets' mobile signals and see which ads best get them into the early voting location (Conversion Zone)

At Penn State, it would look like this:

Simple enough right? It's the used car dealer tactic applied to a national election. And it could be done at scale in any state. In a battleground, it could well tip the outcome. Joe Biden won Pennsylvania in 2020 by just over 80,000 votes. The Penn State football stadium alone holds well over 100,000 people! That's an end zone worth targeting. 

Why Don't We Think This Way in Politics?

As proven as this tactic is, it's being done virtually nowhere in politics. Why? Many reasons probably.

Some are cultural—few political professionals even know this is possible— but now you do.

Some are technical—there are real technology moats to executing this tactic.

But mostly we suspect, it's because in politics we tend to see things through the aperture of persuasion. By contrast, the commercial world is based on conversion—buying and selling concrete things. There's certainly a time for persuasion in politics. In fact it's most of the time. But when the voting starts, it's time to dilate your focus and deliver conversion—actually getting your people to the polls.

Two Ways To Operationalize This Email

🔱  Pull up and ask yourself what your goal is at this stage of the campaign. Is there really anyone left to persuade? 

🔱  Pivot to getting your people to the polls, and ask yourself how you will measure your success.

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