2012 primaries: Message matters, but accurate targeting does too

A recent article in Advertising Age attributed Rick Santorum's success in the Iowa primaries to his ability to zero in on the most likely audience to respond to his platform. By recognizing that he could win over a percentage of Iowa Republicans (and not all of them), Santorum was able to focus his campaign appeal where it mattered most instead of spreading himself too thin.

"Candidates and marketing campaigns get into trouble when they try to be everything to everyone. The reason Rick Santorum did so well in Iowa is that he understood that about half of the conservatives would be up for grabs," the source points out. "Santorum knew who he was going after and focused relentlessly to close the deal."

The success of any political campaign depends on the accuracy with which candidates are able to identify with their target audiences. The same is true of commercial advertising campaigns - matching the message with the right audience makes all the difference. To identify the right online audience in commercial advertising there are methods for defining an audience. Online behavioral tracking is one method used, but because of how often cookies are deleted (whether by the user or on their own), cookie-based tracking leaves roughly 60 percent of the available population unreachable to your message. Some commercial and many other political campaigns use publicly available data at the zip-code level to address this problem, but the variance within the audience within even a single zip-code leads to a lot of wasted resources for marketers and for politicians who are trying to focus their campaigns on the audience that is most likely to respond favorably.

Semcasting's IP Audience Zones provides a far better solution by offering near 100 percent reach and 77 times greater accuracy than standard zip-code targeting. Using reliable psychographic and demographic data, IP Audience Zones can identify the highest concentration of aligned prospects or likely constituents who have the affluence level, political affiliation and life stage to make them the best audience to respond to a campaign.