Democrats push Obama-quality digital tools all the way down to state House races
Maine stateRep. Henry Beck (D) predicts that when the dust settles afterNov. 4, his campaign budget will have topped out at just more than$10,000. It's a new spending record for him, the 28-year-old notes, in this, his fourth run for the Maine state legislature. But it's also just a fraction -- one-100,000th, actually -- of what Barack Obama spent last election cycleto be re-elected president of the United States of America.
Still, Beck has been using digital technologythat was once only available to campaigns with million-dollar budgets: online advertisements that target voters based on their Web browser 'cookies.'
During the 2008 election cycle, when Beck, then 22, made his first successful run for his home state legislature, such digital wizardry seemed like black magic. In 2012, political cookies were still bleeding-edge tech. In 2014, it's a power available to the Henry Becks of the world with a few dollars and few clicks.
It's part of what both Democrats and Republicansidentify as a powerful digital trend. The left has spent the last 10 years developingcampaign technologies, whether it's online advertising, the modeling of voter behavior, or volunteer contact management. This cycle, they say, they have figured out how to get those technologies to play well together -- and in turn make them available to even the smallest campaigns.
What, exactly, gives a state representativethe online ad sophistication tomatch Obama's? It's a new site, launched earlier this month, called DemocraticAds.com. The creators of the site, the D.C.-based firmDSPolitical, has bought up about 600 million browser cookies that contain personal details aboutsome 150 million voters in the United States. Their service isable to take the information contained in a person's "cookies" and match it against data collected about their voting profileto serve up targeted ads. Campaigns are thus ableto marry your online behavior -- what sites you visit -- with the characteristics that define you as a voter -- whether you are a registered Democrat, own a gun or go to express support for the environment.
In the old days,i.e., two years ago,hiring an ad buyer to generatesuch an ad campaign cost at least $20,000.But usingDemocraticAds.com, Beck's ads target themost valuable voters in his district of 8,700 residents along the banks of the Kennebec Riverfor a fee thatstarts at just $500.
Jen Nedeau is a senior director at Bully Pulpit Interactive, the Obama re-election campaign's preferred digital marketing firm. For even the best campaign strategists, she says, data-drivenonline ad buying was, until recently, abreakthrough. But the software the Obama campaign had to custom-buildis now available as off-the-shelf software. "What we've been able to do," says Nedeau, "is to scale the model from the Obama '12 campaign down to local races, from Terry McAuliffe to Bill de Blasio to Marty Walsh," naming Virginia's Democratic governor, and New York City and Boston's new Democratic mayors respectively.
But go evenfarther down the ballot past the de Blasios and the Walshes to the Henry Becks, say Democrats, and the effect is still powerful.Jim Walsh is the chief executiveof DSPolitical, the firm behind the D.I.Y DemocraticAds.com site."Getting someone elected to a state legislator or a city council can conceivably have more impact on people's daily lives than getting someone elected to the U.S. Senate," says Walsh, "especially since you can scale it."
The trick, Democrats say, if figuring out how races big and small can share the costs -- and benefits -- of the best technologies.
New examples pop up all the time.The D.C. technologyfirm NGP VAN, whose software is used by nearly every federal-level Democratic campaign in the country, recently held aproduct launch in front of a packed house of morethan 100 Obamans, campaign veterans, and non-profiteers in downtownWashington'sWoolly Mammoth Theatre. There it introduced something called the Analytics Pipeline, apiece of digital plumbingthat connects even the smallest campaigns to the top-dollar data analytics shops -- few of which existed more than a few years ago -- for just the $45.
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Democrats push Obama-quality digital tools all the way down to state House races