Imagine your job is to fish for blue marlins. You weigh your options and decide to cast a net into the vast ocean. With a stroke of luck, you snag one marlin, but you also haul in a tangled mess of garbage, seaweed, and unidentifiable oozing substances. Welcome to the world of political advertising on social media. It stinks.
At Neptune Ops, we prefer precision targeting, which is why the trident is our symbol. So in this newsletter, we discuss why social media is the net in the ocean of political ads, and the tridents you can use instead to precisely catch your targets.
Casting Controversy on Social Media
First, let's briefly summarize the stench from the social media platforms that we get the most questions about.
❌ TikTok, which is already under scrutiny for its data privacy practices and ties to the Chinese government does not allow political advertising, despite much confusion on this point to the contrary.
❌ Twitter/X has undergone a series of upheavals in its brand safety policies since Elon Musk assumed ownership. Given Musk's tolerance for and personal engagementin racist speech, organizations must decide if associating their brand with this potential reputation risk is worth it. As a matter of policy and to protect clients, Neptune Ops does not advertise on X.
❌ Which brings us to Facebook and Instagram, which as discussed below, make it nearly impossible to catch anything worthwhile.
The Precision Targeting Alternatives
Next let's define the precision targeting alternatives to social media so that we can compare and contrast. In future newsletters we will dig deeper into each of these options.
🔱 Programmatic Connected TV, Online Video, and Display Ads:
These ads appear across thousands of advertising-enabled CTV and online platforms including movies, news, lifestyle, and numerous other content categories. AI allows us to manage numerous platforms to purchase these ads and make decisions in real time to optimize price, video completion rates, and many other key performance indicators (KPIs).
🔱 Native/Contextual Ads:
These ads appear within content based on the subject matter and through the help of AI, transform in real time to match the format of the content. (Ex: ads that appear embedded within text when people are reading about a particular policy issue or political race).
🔱 Programmatic Audio:
These audio ads are played within streaming music, podcasts, news, audiobooks, and other related content. AI algorithms help us reach targeted audiences and maximize completion rates.
🔱 Digital Out-of-Home:
These digital ads appear on billboards, inside airports, on gas station terminals, in elevators, and in numerous other locations. Unlike traditional outdoor advertising, they can be purchased for specific times of the day, and allow for easy content changes.
🔱 Hybrid Programmatic/Social Ads:
These programmatic ads take the appearance of social media ads, often creating higher engagement rates, but are run across thousands of online platforms instead of on social media.
Now let's compare how these tridents stack up to social media . . .
Demographic and Behavioral Targeting
As the Washington Postreported this year in a widely read article in the political industry, "[a]fter years of pitching its suite of social media apps as the lifeblood of campaigns, Meta is breaking up with politics." The company has implemented numerous restrictions on political targeting that gut their usefulness. This includes eliminating the ability to target critical demographics, political beliefs, and even party affiliation.
No such restrictions exist in the precision alternatives listed above, which means that instead of catching garbage, you reach only your targeted audience.
Location Targeting
With programmatic advertising, we geofence voters and policy-makers down to the individual home level. This allows for numerous benefits including eliminating wasted ad dollars, delivering tailored messaging to different audiences, and communicating in the audience's primary language.
But on Meta, the smallest target you can define is a one mile radius.
So programmatic advertising looks like this . . .
while social media looks like this . . .
In typical urban areas, this means you are paying for ads to tens of thousands of people not in your target audience. This enormous difference in precision is, in and of itself, a reason not to use social media for political ads.
Political Ad Blocking
Meta allows users to block political ads entirely. And even when the ads are not blocked, they are often suppressed in Meta's blackbox and constantly changing algorithm.
Further, Meta's latest policy is to block new political ads entirely during the last week of major elections, which sounds fishy to us. This policy has changed several times and could change again.
No mechanism for political ad blocking exists in the precision alternatives listed above.
Changing Rules
Social media companies constantly change their rules on political advertising. As Politicoreported, this has caused many campaigns to "flop," has "hamstrung campaigns and slowed a big piece of the political industry to a crawl."
When political advertisers invest in social media, they are putting themselves at the mercy of a few mercurial billionaires who can and do change the rules without warning. One big fish runs your whole ocean.
With the surgical targeting alternatives above, there is no such single point of failure. No particular fish is bigger than any other. And your campaigns won’t be drowned by the ever-changing tides of Mark Zuckerberg’s whims.
Reach
Finally, there is one fatal flaw in political advertising on social media. Not everyone is on Facebook or Instagram everyday. But almost everyone is online somewhere everyday. With the precision alternatives discussed above, you can reach your targets literally thousands of places online and even out-of-home. But with social media, all you can do is anchor in one spot, and hope that your fish swims into your single net.
So even if you could navigate all of the targeting, blocking, and other flaws outlined above in social media, you're betting how a particular fish will behave. You're still likely to whiff. With the precision alternatives above, we don't guess or gamble. We identify your audiences, and then find them wherever they are in the ocean.
So to summarize . . .
4 Suggestions To Operationalize This Email
🔱 Cut bait on social media for your political ads.
🔱 Review a current project and consider where geo-fencing might help you reach specific targets with existing creative content.
🔱 Consider an upcoming project and how video, precisely delivered through connected TV, might help you convey your message.
🔱 Notice digital out-of-home placements such as billboards, airport signs, and office building displays near your target locations such as a government building, and consider using these options in your next campaign.
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