Getting the Right Message to the Right voter

We often get asked: How do you get the right message to the right voter and where would a moderate woman actually see one of your ads? The short answer is we deliver them right where our audience is already spending time online. We don’t spend money on traditional TV ads, because you don’t know exactly who will see them. Instead, we go directly to our target audience. Let’s walk through the journey together.

Once we’ve tested our messaging and determined that an ad effectively moves moderate women toward progress, we use modeling to identify: (1) the group of women in the voter file database that should see the ad and (2) where they are spending their time online. We then deliver the ads via a variety of mechanisms:

• Pre-roll: these are the short ads we all watch in order to enjoy free content online. We run our ads here so they play before our audience can watch a video on a news site or before a YouTube video they’ve clicked to watch will play on their computer or mobile phone.  
• Over-the-top: these ads play between episodes on streaming sites like Hulu as well as on smart TVs. We know the shows our audience watches so we deliver our ads between their episodes. 
• Social media: we place ads, memes, and gifs on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok so our audience sees our content as they’re interacting on these platforms. 
• Games: a lot of the online games our audience plays, like Candy Crush or bingo, require you to watch an ad to unlock the next level. We deliver our content there as well!

For our audience members who don’t stream media or use smart TVs, we utilize other strategies, like mailing our tested memes via postcards.

Approximately 70% of our ads last year ran on digital platforms using what is called addressable advertising. This type of advertising allows you to use “first-party (i.e., Personal Identifiable Information) and third-party data to target a specific viewer with a specific ad message.” With addressable advertising we can fully utilize results from our rigorous message testing by delivering the right message to the exact right voter and maximizing our return on investment. Our Chief Strategy Officer Kristin Wheeler breaks it down in this short video clip.

Want more of these short explainer videos to understand our work and its impact? Check out our new “About Galvanize Action” playlist on YouTube and follow us on Instagram!