In this blog post…
In the American political landscape, understanding the intricacies of voters’ attitudes and behaviors has never been more crucial. With the 2024 election season on the horizon, the challenge lies in moving beyond broad categorizations like “Democrat,” “Republican,” or “Independent.” Voters seek candidates who resonate with their beliefs and values.
To meet this challenge, Experian has created political personas that offer a nuanced understanding of American voters. In this blog post, we’ll explore how these Experian audiences can help you tailor your engagement strategies for the upcoming election cycle.
Before we dive into our political personas, let’s break down what political campaign marketing is and six benefits of using digital marketing in political campaigns.
What is political campaign marketing?
Political campaign marketing is the strategic engine that drives candidates toward electoral success. It involves crafting and sending out tailored messages to effectively reach constituents to inform them about candidates’ stances on key issues. Think of it as the art of narrative construction, using various communication channels—from traditional media to digital platforms—to engage and mobilize supporters. In an era marked by information saturation, effective campaign marketing serves to cut through the noise to deliver compelling messages that inform, inspire, and spur action.
Benefits of digital marketing in political campaigns
As the 2024 election approaches, using digital marketing in political campaigns becomes paramount to effectively reach and influence voters where they spend a significant portion of their time—online.
Kamala Harris’s entry into the race has shifted spending priorities, particularly in critical states such as Ohio, where the Senate race has already attracted $300 million in ad spending. Political ad spend on connected TV (CTV) is expected to rise significantly, from 2.7% in 2020 to 12.8% this year. The Harris campaign is spearheading this trend, dedicating $200 million to digital ads, with a substantial portion directed toward streaming platforms.
Embracing digital marketing can help campaigns effectively shape opinions and mobilize support. Here are five key benefits of integrating digital marketing strategies into political campaigns:
- Unparalleled reach with targeted advertising: A well-connected digital platform partner can help you reach your target audiences across the ecosystem – from social to the open web.
- Optimization flexibility: Digital marketing allows for quick adjustments in response to real-time data and evolving circumstances.
- Interactive engagement: The interactive nature of digital channels creates meaningful engagement and dialogue between candidates and voters, building connections and community.
- Insights: Robust analytics provide valuable insights into audience behavior and preferences, facilitating continuous optimization and refinement of outreach efforts.
- Amplified messaging: Through digital marketing, political campaigns can amplify their message, mobilize support, and forge deeper connections with voters.
Data serves as the foundation for these benefits. Interactivity hinges on data to deliver the right message and creative for engagement. Insights are gained through pre-campaign research, analyzing audience attributes to grasp their interests and behaviors. Flexibility relies on real-time campaign data, a unique advantage in digital marketing.
In an era where audiences are available readily on most major activation platforms, advertisers need to understand how audiences are built to be privacy conscious and consistent in a cookieless environment.
Experian’s political personas
Digital marketing in political campaigns is crucial to reach and influence voters online. Integrating Experian’s political personas into your political campaign strategy can help you grasp the complexities of today’s American voter landscape and craft tailored engagement strategies. These personas offer invaluable insights into voter viewpoints on key political issues, enriching digital marketing efforts and empowering campaigns to connect with constituents more effectively.
Experian has created 10 political personas to help you better understand today’s American voter so you can reach consumers based on their viewpoints into key political issues.
Our political personas group voters along the political spectrum from most “committed” on the ends of the spectrum.
Let’s walk through how we define each persona starting from the most “committed” personas on the ends of the spectrum.
Committed Democrats
This audience contains consumers who are likely to have a “very liberal” outlook on political issues. They have strong liberal opinions on various topics including key issues and the economy and are very involved in their communities.
Committed Republicans
This audience contains consumers who are likely to have a “very conservative” outlook on political issues. They are well-informed, community-minded individuals with strong opinions that reflect their conservatism. They have very conservative attitudes regarding key social issues.
Moderate Democrats
This audience contains consumers who are likely to have a “somewhat liberal” outlook on political issues.
Moderate Republicans
This audience contains consumers who are likely to have a “somewhat conservative” outlook on political issues.
Political Leaning Liberals
This audience contains consumers who are likely to have strong opinions on key issues that may not align with the traditional Democrat point of view.
Political Leaning Conservatives
This audience contains consumers who are likely on-the-fence on traditional Republican points of view on key issues.
Liberal Leaning Independents
This audience contains consumers who are registered independents and who are likely to have a “middle of the road” outlook on political issues while tending to lean more liberal.
Conservative Leaning Independents
This audience contains consumers who are likely registered independents and likely have a “middle-of-the-road” outlook on political issues while tending to lean more conservative.
Political Unregistered Liberal Leaning
This audience contains consumers who are not likely to have aligned with a specific party, but have a more liberal attitude. They are well-informed and are aware of important political issues. They frequently align with but are not necessarily completely aligned with liberal points of view.
Political Unregistered Conservative Leaning
This audience contains consumers who are not likely to have aligned with a specific party, but have a more conservative attitude. They are well-informed and are aware of important political issues. They frequently align with but are not necessarily completely aligned with conservative points of view.
These 10 personas can help you better understand who the American voter is, but when combined with our 200 politically relevant audiences, such as watches political TV, donations to charitable causes, engagement channel preferences, hobbies, and more, the ability to study and improve engagement for each persona is considerably magnified.
How to combine our political personas with other audiences
If you’re a political candidate looking to reach an important population, Experian audiences are available on-the-shelf of major platforms. For example, if you want to reach unregistered voters and independent voters to influence green initiatives within your community, you can focus on unregistered and moderate personas in the area and combine that with audiences interested in green initiatives, like our GreenAware segments – which predict a consumer’s attitude and point of view on environmental issues.
You can use our “Political Unregistered Liberal Leaning”, “Liberal Leaning Independents,” and GreenAware “Think Greens” audience segments to reach constituents who are likely to be most interested in your message.
To reach voters based on their regional voting patterns, you can use our new battleground counties and district audiences:
- Affiliation Switcher Counties
- Battleground Counties
- House Battleground Districts
- Democrat Counties
- Republican Counties
- Independent Counties
Add Experian’s audiences to your 2024 election strategy
Political advertising spend is projected to surpass $12 billlion in the 2024 election cycle, generating the largest amount of voter outreach in the history of American elections. Experian’s audiences are available on major activation platforms allowing you to strategically reach constituents who would be most impacted and interested in your initiatives.
As we approach a cookieless future, Experian’s political personas are cookie resilient. Our data is rooted in both offline and online data that doesn’t rely on third-party cookies. The personas do not rely on an individual’s browsing behavior. Experian can help our partners understand and engage with these political audiences.
Over 200 politically relevant Experian audiences are available for activation on-the-shelf of the leading TV, demand, and supply platforms. Here are the platforms where you can find our political audiences:
- ArcSpan
- Audigent
- Cadent
- Eyeota
- Magnite
- Microsoft
- Nexxen
- Pandora
- Permutive
- Samsung Ads
- The Trade Desk
- Verizon Media
- Viant
- Videoamp
- Yieldmo
Can’t find the audience you’re looking for or need a custom audience? Connect with our audience team for more information.
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It’s the holiday season! For some, this is the time of year for family, friends and reflection. For the other 97 percent* of us, it’s time to shop! America’s obsession with Black Friday, Cyber Monday and the rest of the holiday shopping season has never been stronger. Or weaker? Or something? All I know is that you should be skeptical of anything you see regarding the Thanksgiving weekend performance. And now, I will tell you about the Thanksgiving weekend performance We’re not discussing revenue in this post. Instead, we’ll dive into the weekend’s email subject lines – more specifically, how “percent off” deals affected email open rates. As everyone knows, Black Friday and Cyber Monday are the days for deals. Juicy “percent off” offers motivate customers to buy, buy, buy. But is the conventional wisdom, that “a deep discount will get people to engage with my brand,” actually right? A few weeks ago, my counterpart in the UK published an analysis of how percentage off discounts influence open rates. Taking the cue from Karl, I wanted to expand this analysis into the U.S. market, paying special attention to Thanksgiving weekend. To begin, I gathered data on a few thousand mailings from our largest retail clients. To determine the baseline expected open rates, I averaged each brand’s performance in the 6 weeks prior to Black Friday. I then analyzed all the mailings sent on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, dividing the subject lines based on the appearance of a percentage off offer. Interestingly, percentage off offers were less prominent than I expected: And when percentages off were present… their values were all over the place: Higher volume doesn’t lead to improved performance Conventional wisdom would suggest that advertising a discount more frequently would lead to better performing discounts. The data, however, doesn’t support that idea. When I looked at volume distribution and relative performance for each advertised discount, I found a relatively strong negative correlation of -0.63. So the more frequently a discount was advertised, the worse it tended to perform. We can see this visually in the chart below: On average, advertising discounts did not significantly improve open rates. What happened? The first thing to note here is the wide spread in the data – some percentage off discounts worked very well! Overall, though, shouting about a discount wasn’t what convinced customers to open emails during the holidays. But maybe it wasn’t just the percentage off discounts that faltered this season – perhaps all opens were down? As you can see in the histogram above – this wasn’t the case. The average mailing not touting a percentage off discount did ever so slightly better than the baseline average. Still, the spread of data is very wide, with a lot of variation in results. It could be that the dispersion of results was a product of each brand’s initial baseline; brands that normally had great engagement would see positive gains for percentage off discounts while brands with poor engagement would see little to negative lifts, or vice versa. But this hypothesis was also proven incorrect, as the relative starting place for each brand versus the discount performances had a correlation approaching zero. No matter which way I sliced it, the performance of discounted subject lines were more or less random. Ultimately, this last point is the most important. The subject line, for all its ubiquity and focus, is probably a lot less influential than we tend to believe. Sure, a subject line can be optimized, carefully crafted to invoke the greatest lift in response possible, but the baseline expected performance is influenced by a much larger conversation – the one between the brand and its customers. If the brand relationship has been cultivated and refined through intelligent interactions and sophisticated targeting, the open rate is likely going to be higher. If every marketing message simply shouts, DISCOUNT, DISCOUNT, DISCOUNT, and there is no larger value-add, engagement probably won’t be great. Advertising a discount in a subject line might really help get people involved – or it might not. So what is the future of the subject line? Are they worth the disproportionate time and energy that marketing organizations tend to spend on them? Or should we recognize that their importance is probably minimal? The truth is, it’s a little bit of both. Subject lines are important – they are the first impression and often the first interaction of the day with a customer. But their importance is likely inversely related to the strength of the brand (the “from” line, if you will). The stronger the relationship is, the less important the subject line becomes. Maybe that’s the ideal – a perfect “from” name, one that tells you more about what’s inside the message than a subject line ever could. *Not a real stat Connect with Jacob Davis, Senior Analyst, on Twitter: @davisj2007.
Before we get to the gift guides, here’s a brief update on the hottest products from the week including Cyber Monday. This week’s biggest movers and new additions to the list are a clear sign that Christmas is upon us. “Star Shower,” a laser light that bathes your house in festive lights without having to untangle cords, jumped to second place, up 49 rank points from the week prior. Likewise, the return of “Elf on the Shelf” to the hot products list coincides with his return to the homes of children nationwide. Otherwise, things seems to have stabilized with Fitbit showing no signs of falling from first place and Pie Face game being this year’s sensation. Toys Shopkins remains the toy to beat this season followed by Pie Face game, which remained in second place after skyrocketing interest during the week of Thanksgiving. Toys new to the top 10 this week include some old favorites like the Easy Bake Oven and Paw Patrol toys as well as the new entrant Glammin Salon Vanity. Keep checking back each week for the latest hot toys. This chart shows the 10 most searched for toys and games based on search clicks to Toys “R” Us – USA. Gift guide insight When it comes to buying presents for the holidays, some individuals are easy to shop for while others require a bit of inspiration. And when consumers need inspiration, consumers turn to the Web. Searches for “gifts for,” “gift guide” and “gift ideas” grow increasingly common as we get closer and closer to Christmas with peak search activity around this topic typically observed during the last full week before Christmas, which this year would be the week ending Saturday December 19th. Some of the most common gift recipients mentioned in gift guide-related searches are: “men,” “guys,” “her,” “mom,” “dad” and “girlfriend.” But shoppers are also frequently looking for suggestions on the perfect gift for someone very specific interests, such as “hunters,” “gamers” and “beer lovers” as well as specific types of gifts, like “tech” or “personalized.” The following gift guide insights, derived using our new AudienceView platform, were designed to highlight for you, as a marketer, the interests and preferences of key consumer segments so that you can more effectively tailor your campaigns to be more relevant and engaging. But if it also helps you, as a consumer, come up with the perfect gift for that hard-to-shop-for person in your life, then even better! Each gift guide contains a representative mix of search terms that were performed at above average rates by each audience segment during the four weeks ending November 28, 2015. They include a mix of product and retail brands and provide a good idea of the interests, style preferences and lifestyles of each audience. Learn more about how AudienceView can deliver unparalleled insights into your consumer audience so that you can deliver a better brand experience.
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