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.
Latest posts
On some level, collecting data and analyzing it to find meaningful conclusions has always been part of how marketers go about connecting with consumers. Their strategies have improved dramatically over time, though. Perhaps in a previous era, marketing executives were only able to make sweeping generalizations about large swathes of the population. But, as marketers have gathered more data on individual consumers, they’ve found ways to fine-tune their searches. They’re no longer messaging to groups in vague terms. Smart Data Collective recently examined the marketing world’s transition away from broad stereotyping toward better targeted forms of data mining. Josh Brown, a member of the marketing team at business and IT consulting company Iconic Mind, argues that this era of overgeneralization is coming to an end. We now have the capability to zoom in on the specific customer. “Big data is how successful companies are building more detailed models of consumer behavior,” Brown wrote. “Instead of relying on the traditional demographic models that marketers used when we were operating in a mass consumption environment and had nothing better, big data capitalizes on developing market trends to allow businesses to become far more specific when segmenting their customers.” Brown cited Amazon.com as an example. The online superstore is notable for its targeted recommendations of products that shoppers see every time they log on to the site – the advisements are impressive because they’re usually right up the customer’s alley. Amazon doesn’t generate these ideas by making guesses based on whether the consumer is old or young, male or female – instead, the site takes in specific information about people’s buying histories and looks for similar products. This approach is quickly becoming mainstream. It’s not hard to understand why – people don’t like being reduced to profiles of their demographic characteristics. Consumers are expecting more from the companies they do business with. Thanks to the rapidly improving technologies that companies use for data collection, marketers can be more targeted and make more intelligent interactions. However, to take advantage of these new technologies, marketers need to maintain high quality data. Without a data quality strategy, customer information will be spread out across the organization, making it difficult to make intelligent marketing offers. To learn more about improving your understanding of consumers, check-out our infographic on building a single customer view.
Adam Garone is the CEO & co-founder of Movember, the annual world-wide charity movement dedicated to changing the face of men's health – all through the power of the moustache. To date, over 3 million moustaches have been grown and supported for Movember, raising more than $440 million to change the face of men's health. Adam kicked off day two of the EMS Client Summit by saying he’s a lucky guy because he gets “to wear a 1993 porn stash year-round.” That line got a laugh, but Adam’s storytelling around Movember really caught the attention of Summit attendees. Adam had learned that prostate cancer affects as many men as breast cancer does women, and while discussing this fact over beers with his brother in Australia, the idea for Movember was born. They took the Aussie slang for moustache (“mo”) and combined it with “November” (a good month for men to grow them) to create the name. That was in 2003 and over the last decade, Movember has become a global movement around prostate and testicular cancer awareness, as well as men’s mental health issues. Watch his full presentation below: [Watch video on YouTube] Here are some cool facts cited by Adam: Everyone who grows a moustache for Movember is a “celebrity ambassador.” Last year, 2.7 billion conversations about Movember and men’s health issues were generated during the month of November. Most foundations go out with a “fear-based message” (x number of men die from cancer each year, for example). Movember has never done that. They encourage nicknames (i.e., participants are called “mo-bros”) and want people to have fun with it. Adam’s message: don’t be part of it because you’re scared, but because you will be fine and you get to help others. Each year they totally revamp their brand, changing the look, feel and tone. A few years ago their theme was “The Modern Gentleman” and last year it was “Movember and Sons,” and played off the relationship between father and son. Movember raised $145 million last year. They put 10% of the funds into a pool that goes towards research around other diseases. Adam says this kind of collaboration is to help reduce the heaving competition amongst charities that typically compete for donations. Key takeaways when it comes to growing a foundation (or business) from the ground up: Start with a great idea – naivety is good Rely on strong leadership –have a clear vision and detailed plan and work really, really hard Recruit amazing people – preserve culture and values During rapid growth, keep it simple—stay true to your core Brand management is key – sometimes you have to say no to potential partners because they don’t fit with your brand (in a humble way, of course) Know your customers – inspire them to become your ambassadors Partnerships are key Never underestimate a room full of people
These days, there are a number of buzzwords being thrown around the marketing industry and the data management space. One of the biggest? Say it with me: Big Data. NPR argued last December that ‘big data’ should’ve been the “word of the year,” in part due to the re-election of President Barack Obama. Obama’s campaign managers didn’t let the Republicans’ monetary advantage discourage them. Instead, they gathered information on their voters and compiled important analytics based on that information. By handling this mass of data in an organized and well thought out process, they were able to more effectively appeal to voters and ultimately win the re-election. Marketers and corporations across the country were inspired by the campaign’s success, and have turned to big data to solve their problems as well. Anyone who catches the news on a regular basis, shops online, or owns a smartphone can see this evolution firsthand. However, it’s worth mentioning that this progression doesn’t necessarily mean “big understanding” or “big information.” Many companies are faltering in their efforts to harness big data and make real use of it. The pool of information is constantly changing, and as so many businesses rush to gather the data in real-time, it becomes even more challenging to keep pace and actively comprehend information as it becomes available. And the challenges go beyond the initial harnessing of the data. As big data continues to grow, companies are running into issues of incorrect and duplicate data in their systems. This erroneous data is a result of poor processes that companies have in place, and oftentimes begins at the point of data input. For a number of companies, data input is performed on a daily basis via their call centers. When incorrect data is recorded, it prevents sales representatives from getting leads in a timely manner, and hampers them further when they try to contact the correct individuals seeking assistance. The resulting slower response time then goes on to impact a company’s SLA and credibility to the population they serve. There is no doubt that when processed correctly, big data can be integral to a company looking to improve their understanding of the customer’s needs and wants. But data quality is an important consideration during the transition, and one that must be confronted before big data can reveal all it has to offer. To learn more about big data and how it relates to the data quality initiatives that may be taking place within your organization, watch Experian QAS’ webinar, “Ensuring Data Quality in your Big Data Initiative.” Learn more about the author, Erin Haselkorn