In the ninth episode of ad-tech | AlikeAudience, Dhimant Bhundia, Head of Product at IQM Corporation, a political-first programmatic media buyer platform, discusses Political Advertising with Co-founder of AlikeAudience, Bosco Lam, and Director of The Brand Creatives, Jessica Lam.
Tune in to get intriguing insights on:
• Unique solutions that programmatic advertising offers political advertisers
• Types of campaigns to reach voters
• Pitfalls that advertisers need to be aware of
• Different strategies to target voters
• The future of data safety in programmatic advertising
Hello from AdTech | AlikeAudience
Jessica Lam: This podcast is brought to you by AlikeAudience, the premier audience-targeting company with high-performing mobile audience segments. And every month, we spotlight leading executives, CEOs and marketers from industry-leading companies. I’m your host today, Jessica from The Brand Creatives, a marketer and copywriter who helps tech companies grow with authority content. If you enjoy the podcast, subscribe and visit our website.
Guests for the episode: Dhimant Bhundia and Bosco Lam
Jessica Lam: Welcome to episode nine of AlikeAudience ad-tech Podcast. Today our guest is Dhimant Bhundia. He is the Head of Product at IQM Corporation. It’s a political-first programmatic media buying and voter intelligence platform. And we also have with us AlikeAudience’s Bosco Lam, who’s an expert in ad-tech solutions and data privacy.
Jessica Lam: I’m super excited about our topic today. It’s about political advertising. I think this is especially a relevant topic as we close on to election time in the States. We will cover some very important questions like how programmatic advertising will help the political industry, what are some things and pitfalls political advertisers have to be aware of, as well as how to use programmatic solutions as part of your strategy to advertise and target political segments. So let’s jump right in.
Meet Dhimant Bhundia
Jessica Lam: So I’d like to turn over first to Dhimant to introduce your background and your current role. Could you share a little bit more about what you’re doing in your industry?
Dhimant Bhundia: Hey, Bosco and the team. First of all, thank you for inviting me to this podcast and for giving me the opportunity to talk about programmatic and data solutions in politics. For our listeners, my name is Dhimant Bhundia. I’m Head of Product at IQM. Let me briefly talk about my background and my journey so far. I’ve been in the ad-tech industry for more than a decade now. In the past, I have led various ad-tech and MarkTech products. The kind of products I lead are demand side platforms, data management platforms, email marketing platforms, and also pre-bid products for fraud prevention solutions.
From the industry point of view, I have experience working in location-based or retail industry, CTV or media buying industry, media measurement and verification industry, and of course, the political industry. Now, regarding my current role, I joined IQM around seven months back. IQM is a political-first programmatic media buying and voter intelligence platform. I lead product management, engineering and marketing teams here at IQM.
Using audience data in political ad campaigns
Jessica Lam: Wonderful. And what about you, Bosco? Do you have some context you’d like to share about our topic today and about your own background?
Bosco Lam: Thank you, Jessica, and welcome Dhimant to join us as our guest today. My pleasure, our pleasure as well as a company. So I’m Bosco Lam from AlikeAudience. I am a co-founder of AlikeAudience. I also work in the iAB Tech Lab working group for data privacy. To be very honest, I’m not an expert in political-specific data or campaigns. The reason why we would like to have Dhimant to be onstage today is basically because the mid-term election is around the corner in November.
A lot of these big tech, they actually have some, not the limitations, but they have some internal policy, that does not allow political campaigns on audience data so as to minimize the big tech influence. And I think this is to the general public concerns are very sensitive topics on how data is being used, how political campaigns are being run today, given, you know, Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, a couple of years ago. So, we’d love to explore this topic and Dhimant with your experience and to add with DSP, measurement, location data, and now political campaigns. We would like to ask you a few questions on that. Maybe we can begin by telling the audience how political campaigns are being run today.
Programmatic platforms create unique solutions for political advertisers
Dhimant Bhundia: Specific to the political industry, let me tell you how the programmatic platform provides some unique solutions that no other platform offers in the market. The first thing I would like to talk about is reaching the offline voter list online. One of the criteria of political marketers is they have offline voter lists, and they want to reach those users digitally. Platforms like IQM, which work in this space, have voter identity solutions that map offline voter lists to online. Through this programmatic DSP platform, it is possible to reach these offline voters into the digital platforms that they use.
Another point I would like to talk about is programmatic platforms offer some unique solutions for political marketing campaigns. For example, let’s talk about GOTV campaigns. So GOTV is get-out-the-vote campaign. For this campaign, programmatic advertising offers a unique solution to integrate the map and the calendar with the ad. So after an ad is served, a voter can save the voting date to the calendar and also get directions towards the voting station directly from the ad. Because of these kinds of offerings, programmatic advertising is more relevant than other methods of advertising. It offers a great experience for the voters and also a great performance for the marketers.
A couple of other points I would like to talk about is programmatic advertising offers some unique location targeting. So through a programmatic platform, it is possible to reach unique geo boundary locations specific to political space, such as congressional districts, state house, senate house, etc. Programmatic advertising offers Omni channel solutions. So it is possible to reach a voter on all possible channels like CTV, desktop, mobile, tablets, and in different formats like banner, rich media, video, audio, and native during its voting journey.
Programmatic also offers some new ways to target voters, which was not possible by other traditional methods. For example, using contextual targeting technologies, it is now possible to understand a voter’s online behavior. We can understand now what kind of content a voter consumes online and what kind of sentiments he has towards the candidate or towards an issue. And we can put this data in front of the political marketer, and a political marketer can use this data to target voters based on their sentiments towards a candidate or an issue. So this kind of unique offering is provided by a programmatic platform nowadays that is not provided by other platforms.
Targeting voters based on their location
Jessica Lam: Thanks for sharing that, Dhimant. And what about you, Bosco? Do you have insights from AlikeAudience to share on political targeting and some of the methods that you’re familiar with?
Bosco Lam: Thanks, Dhimant, for that wonderful introduction about how political campaign is run on programmatic advertising. Actually, I’m very interested in knowing more about the unique location targeting because, for AlikeAudience, we have been processing location signals. And our clients may come to us and say, for this particular swing States, how I can best lavish location signals and target particular groups of voters. So Dhimant, do you have a use case to share with us on this particular location data leverage?
Dhimant Bhundia: So Bosco, political marketers typically want to target voters with respect to the locations in real-time or based on their location visitation behavior of certain political places, such as congressional district, rallies, marches, statehouse, conventions, etc. With respect to swing States, when we get requirements from the political marketers, they have typically identified these key districts or key events that they want to target. And they want us to target the voters who are currently in the location, on the premise, or they’ve attended one of the events in the past, and they want to target them wherever they are.
Different types of programmatic political campaigns
Jessica Lam: It sounds like there are many different intriguing ways that programmatic advertising can be used in politics and political targeting. What about from the perspective of political marketers? What should they usually be looking for? And how should they be approaching their targeting, Dhimant?
Dhimant Bhundia: Political marketers are interested in a number of things. And let me start with the types of campaign data.
One is GOTV. So I already talked about GOTV before. So that’s get-out-the-vote campaign. The goal of the GOTV campaign is to motivate voters and direct them to the polling location on election day.
The other type of campaign they run is the Persuasion campaign. They want to influence voters to support you over your opposition. Tax Issue and Advocacy campaigns. So here, the purpose is to raise awareness about an issue. And the issue is typically focused on economic, political, social or environmental domains.
Next, the Public Affairs campaign. The goal of the Public Affairs campaign is to target influencers or policymakers here, not the voters. And they want to target them to influence them to change certain laws or regulations.
Next, the Candidate Awareness campaign. So in this type of campaign, the candidate wants voters to get familiarized with the candidates, their details, their platforms, stance on various issues, etc.
Next is, Event Promotion campaign, so when they organize rallies or any event, they want to promote them, and they want more and more people to join that event. So that’s why they’re on event promotion campaigns. And I guess there’s one more, the Fundraising campaign. As the name suggests, they want to raise more funds towards the political campaign.
They typically run all these types of campaigns along with typical targeting criteria, like targeting voters based on location, gender, age, and income. Political marketers in the political space are especially interested in targeting voters based on certain political characteristics. What do I mean by that? They want to target these voters based on political affiliation, ethnicity, based on their views on certain propositions or bills, etc.
What kind of challenges do political marketers face?
Jessica Lam: Wonderful. So there are many, many different ways with which political marketers can become creative and leverage these political advertising targeting. What about challenges that they should be aware of? Are there any challenges that they should know about when advertising in the political programmatic?
Dhimant Bhundia: I would say that one of the biggest challenges is offline to online targeting. So as I mentioned before, political programmatic platforms have voter identity solutions through which they target this offline voter list online. But considering all the recent changes in this space, like data privacy, cookieless, and MAID-less targeting, it’s very challenging to target this voter list online. And on top of this, match-rate matters to the marketer. So what percentage of these offline voters the programmatic platform can target online? So that matters to the marketers the most. First of all, targeting these voters online and giving a good match-rate to the marketers is one of the biggest challenges.
If I talk about other challenges, then I would say regulations and compliance with different States. So each State has its unique regulations for political ads, and how to customize programmatic solutions to be in compliance with regulations across different States is one of the challenges. The other, I would say, keeping up-to-date with political geo boundaries. So as I mentioned before, political marketers target voters based on political geolocation such as congressional districts, state house, senate house, etc. The boundaries of this geo areas change quite often. And making sure that the correct boundaries are reflected for the right latest election cycle is often a challenge for the programmatic platforms as well.
Another thing I would like to talk about is making the campaign live as quickly as possible. So considering the creative and campaign approval process, sometimes it becomes challenging to make the campaign live ASAP. Political marketers are generally looking to start the campaign as early as possible. We’ll add one more point that providing detailed insights of the voters’ data based on the voters’ lifestyle, their political affiliation is one of the challenges in this space as well for programmatic platforms.
How can they overcome these challenges?
Jessica Lam: So that sounds like quite a lot of things to be aware of, from like, be offline to online matching and then the urgent nature of campaigns. So how should political marketers educate themselves? Should they know about all these different challenges? Or do they need to plan ahead to be able to overcome these challenges?
Dhimant Bhundia: That’s a very good question. It will definitely help as soon as they plan the marketing campaign. And if it’s planned in advance, even from the programmatic platform point of view, they can also prepare the voters’ data, they can prepare the campaign, and make sure that the campaign follows all the regulations. They can make sure that the campaign has all the approval processes as well. So it becomes easier for the programmatic platform and people who work in this space to make the campaign as live as possible. So that’s one part of it.
The other thing I would say depends on a few platforms—I don’t like to provide the names here—on how the platform makes it possible. For example, some of the platforms, when they get the offline voter list, they send the data to other platforms like LiveRamp, and they get the data. It typically takes 48 to 72 hours. IQM is one of the platforms where we have our in-house DSP as well. And we claim that typically the platform can go live in 24 to 48 hours. So choosing the right platform, I would say, is one of the ways as well.
Reaching voters through email vs. other channels
Jessica Lam: So Bosco, what about your thoughts on challenges in the political programmatic space? Do you have anything to add to that?
Bosco Lam: Yeah, I think, in general, I want to play devil’s advocate. Given that the voters have given consent to reach them through emails, why can’t we just target them on eDM or with other means like direct emails, rather than extending all these email identity solutions to programmatic? Dhimant, have you ever compared the performance of reaching the voters through email versus political campaigns on programmatic?
Dhimant Bhundia: That’s a very good question, Bosco. Political marketers do send us the voters’ emails to target them online. And one thought that typically people have is why don’t we directly reach them out and directly send them an email? So what I have seen is political marketers generally want to target voters across as many different channels as possible. And they want to reach out to these voters across different devices and channels during their voting journey. So email is just one part of it. In a programmatic platform, typically, DSP targets these voters across different devices on their mobile, desktop, laptop and TV, and across in different formats as well like banner, video, native, audio, rich media, etc. Political marketers want to leverage this opportunity to reach out to voters during their voting journey on these platforms.
So what they do is they have some budget for email, some budget for these programmatic channels, some budget for social, and some budget for direct mail. They reach out to voters based on the voter segments based on where the marketing campaigns are most effective. So based on that, they divide the budget. And they run marketing campaigns, they run programmatic campaigns, they run email campaigns, they run direct mail, social, and other campaigns as well.
Jessica Lam: So it sounds like it’s like traditional marketing; you want to reach the consumers as many touch points as possible at the right time, seeing the same message. Is that right?
Dhimant Bhundia: That’s correct.
How do political ad-tech companies manage data safety?
Jessica Lam: Yeah, that’s interesting. What about data safety? How do political programmatic platforms manage this topic, which is a big concern for most marketers today?
Dhimant Bhundia: I would say that political ad-tech companies manage data safety the same way other ad-tech companies manage. Voters’ data is no different than users’ data on other platforms. Voters’ details and personal information, PII data, are fully anonymized before being used for any other purposes. And we comply with all data laws, such as GDPR and CCPA. We are a part of DAA – Digital Advertising Alliance. And for the USA, we also follow all State guidelines. We make sure that no personal information is compromised. Advertising is still relevant and useful for the voters, and campaigns give good performance to the marketers.
Bosco Lam: I also want to add to this for being non-partisan, right? We are not leaning toward either one party. So I would imagine we do not track users’ data. Rather, we are only processing this data so that we enable political marketers to target the voters on these platforms. And I think being neutral is very important. Just like how we did for the general marketers, right? Either we have two competing sports brands or e-commerce brands. We do not lean on either side and just provide a neutral service.
Key strategies in political advertising
Jessica Lam: Excellent. Obviously, both IQM and AlikeAudience have quite a lot of experience marketing in politics and targeting political segments. What are some key strategies that we could share with our audience should they wish to advertise in the political space?
Dhimant Bhundia: Let me talk about a few strategies that I have learned during my experience, right? Overall, the ad-tech industry is heavily dependent on IDs, like cookies, MAIDs, and TV IDs. And in all other industries, all companies use these IDs as the primary identification for the users. And we all know that once this goes away, the industry has been working on providing solutions to universal IDs, IPs, and contextual advertising. However, what I have learned in this space is that you work with a lot of offline data, and your job is to target these voters online. So digital identity graph is a must in this business.
The other thing is targeting specific categories of publications based on their political affiliation. So what I’ve learned is certain publications like news channels and websites are affiliated with one political group, such as Democratic or Republican. And when marketers come, they want to target websites that are most relevant or useful for their voters. So targeting specific categories of publications based on their political affiliation is a very good strategy as well.
The next I want to talk about is location targeting. So, as I mentioned before, targeting voters based on the real-time location or based on their location visitation behavior or political places would be a very good strategy for marketers.
And next, I would like to talk about online behavior. So understanding voters’ online behavior, what kind of content a voter consumes online using contextual technologies, understanding the voters’ sentiments towards the candidates, and what kind of issues they support or do not support and providing this data to the marketers, and if marketer target voters based on the voters’ sentiments towards them, towards the candidates or towards the issue he or she supports. That would be a very good strategy as well. And also, working with the data that provide for political characteristics such as political affiliation and voters’ views on certain propositions and bills would be a good strategy as well.
Restrictions of location-based targeting
Bosco Lam: I think, in particular to location signals, I think this is very sensitive. When we compare particular political campaigns, right, you target a very fine-grained household. So like even the zip code level, even like ZIP+4 level, versus our generic location-based targeting, you target people based on sharing similar interests or target people who have visited a fast food chain, that will be a larger segment versus a very fine-grind political segment.
So I think marketers may, specific to political marketers, have to adjust the measurement on how they evaluate the location-based strategy. So, for example, I’m just thinking out of the box; if they want to target a fine-grind household, they may utilize email marketing because that is very straightforward to a particular person. Versus through programmatic advertising, we have some limitations, like one segment, we cannot have less than 1000 IDs. And we cannot target down to that particular full Zip 9 level, which is like only a few houses around.
So these are some restrictions on, or I would say, limitations on, programmatic advertising. Rather than saying, I want to reach out to particular voters, we may want to set awareness for political parties that the theme they want to drive, may be possible. So yeah, just to conclude that they may want to set different KPIs for the email strategy versus the location-based strategy.
Dhimant Bhundia: Definitely. And I do agree with Bosco that when they typically set or plan their marketing campaigns, they evaluate how they want to measure the success of it. And also what are the criteria for targeting certain sets of users and all.
What does the future of ad-tech look like?
Jessica Lam: Wonderful, that’s a lot of really interesting insights on the key strategies to use. So let’s wrap up the podcast with a final question on the future of ad-tech and data and politics. Do both of you have anything to share on what we can expect in the next three to five years?
Bosco Lam: Obviously, I always embrace that transparency within the audience and also the brands, right? So, in this case, the brand is the political party, and the audience is the voters. I think we have to state explicitly who has access to that voter registration information. And we have explicit consent that we can reach them out either through emails or through programmatic advertising. I think this will be the baseline for all these strategies. And I think in the next three to five years, identities is definitely a challenge in order to balance privacy and as well as the deprecation of cookies. At this moment, I don’t see a scalable solution that will be available in the market soon.
Google is building their own privacy sandbox. And on the other camp, we have unified ID and other open source definitions of identities. So we should follow the market closely. And I don’t think any of these solutions should be private goods, right? It could be easily influenced by any company. Instead, it should be a public good that serves the whole advertising industry in the means that everyone can access that open source encryption. And only the end-to-end parties would have the rights that will come through the consensus. I think this will be the most important for us to have a sustainable industry in the next three to five years.
Dhimant Bhundia: Yeah, Bosco. Those two are very good points. I just like to add some more information. So about the transparency point, right? So as of now, we have more regulations and disclosures for the federal campaigns but not much for the local political campaign. And these things are going to change. The industry is moving towards more transparency and disclosure overall. And about your identity solution point. I definitely 100% agree with what you said. And I also believe that it will be possible to connect voters with other digital characteristics in a more seamless way than what we have now in the next three to five years. And I’ll add one more point that the unique solution that I talked about GOTV before, I expect to see some more political use case specific programmatic solutions in this space as well.
Subscribe and stay tuned!
Jessica Lam: Excellent. Thank you so much for sharing, Dhimant and Basco. I’ve learned a lot today about all these different ways to target political voters. And I hope our audience got a lot out of it as well. So thank you again for coming on and sharing in your podcast, and we hope to see you again soon.
Thank you so much for listening. To find the show notes, transcripts and more information about our audience segment offerings, log on to our website, www.alikeaudience.com. If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to hit subscribe and leave us a review. We’ll catch you in the next session.
