Programmatic Advertising – The tech-driven way to win those votes

Ashish
Shah, Founder & CEO, Vertoz shares insights on how can Programmatic Advertising
be used effectively in running a winning political campaign.  

India is a large,
diverse, fluid, and dynamic society. The Indian electorate is a mixed bag of
voters belonging to different age brackets and they are a part of different
groups with respect to their minorities, and casts. They also have varied religious
preferences, belief systems and political affinities. Moreover, there is also a
huge economic gap, and the Urban-Rural divide.

What would you do if you were faced with the task of wooing such a diverse, fragmented and a large voter base of 813.25 million Indians to vote in your favor?

You would need a strong
strategy backed with solid data.

Well, the good news is
that despite having such huge differences, the Indian electorate also has a few
similar habits. With India going digital, Indians are leaving behind a large
digital footprint. Around 500 million Indians are accessing the internet
currently. Further, India’s smartphone penetration is constantly on the rise.
It is expected to be around 39% in 2019, as per Statista. Factors like affordable handset prices and low-cost internet availability are fueling
this growth. As a result, Indians are spending more and more time on digital
media. Neilsen says, Indians spent more than
50% of their total time on smartphones in activities like browsing, video
streaming, social networking, chatting, and photo apps. According to Statista, India bags the top rank with 300 million Facebook users.
Around 200 million Indians use WhatsApp.

Today,
voters are present on multiple digital screens like mobiles, laptops, tablets
and internet connected TVs. Thus, it is imperative for the parties to have an
omnichannel digital presence. As the digital platforms are a common thread
between the diverse sections in the Indian voter base, it is vital to reach out
to them on these platforms. Digital platforms facilitate reaching out to a
varied voter base, and partiescan win their hearts by addressing the different
issues faced by each section. Owing to precise and granular targeting, it is
very easy to reach a specific section, going as niche as targeting a pin-code.
This enables parties to deliver highly relevant messages to the voters from
that region.  

Thus, digital advertising and leveraging the power of data will play a major role in the upcoming elections.

The perfect
amalgamation of the two is programmatic advertising. With its unique targeting
capabilities, parties will be able to target the voters on criteria like party
affiliation, political ideals, gender, age, location, financial status,
ownership, business, education and so on. This helps the politicians to reach
the voters, to convey their message.

Data is an
integral part of the programmatic advertising functionality. By crafting a
data-driven strategy with programmatic advertising, parties can build effective
campaigns that involve developing a deep understanding of the people’s
problems, frustrations and pain points. They can thus address the right
problems through their messages and connect with the voters at a better level.

Data Management Platforms (DMPs) play an instrumental role in this through their advanced data crunching techniques.

DMPs help
in analyzing and processing the voter data and providing relevant voter
segments for the parties to reach out.

Based on voters’
political affiliations, they can be categorized into three different segments –
Undecided, Supporters and Dissenters.

Undecided voters are the ones who
do not have any strong affinity towards a party yet. This segment associates
more weightage to tangible policies and their impact on everyday life, as
opposed to the value systems. These can be influenced positively and won over.

The “Supporters” include those whosevalue system
aligns with the party’s. These may be casual supporters, strong evangelists or
those in a strong opposition to the victory of the other party.

“Dissenters”, on the other hand, are the
ones who strongly oppose the party and its value system. These are the tough
nuts to crack, but once they align with a party, they can turn into staunch
supporters, and even successfully play the role of party evangelists.

Similarly,
based on the demographics like income and age, the electorate can be divided into
segments like Young Aspirers, Low Income
Strivers, and Rural Indians.

Young Aspirers are the ones who have
a radically different mindset from the older generations and are reshaping &driving the digital
ecosystem in India.

Low Income Strivers is a segment of upwardly mobile Indians
who want to rise above their circumstances and see the internet as a tool to do
so.

Rural Indians include the ones who follow their unsatiating
urban dreams, are the mainstream adopters of goods and services, aspiring to
earn a better and more comfortable life for themselves and their families. Programmatic advertising can help to uncover these key insights
about the voter segments and allow parties to target them accordingly.

What’s
more?

Programmatic
advertising reduces the number of wasted ad impressions, which in turn brings
down the inefficiencies and bloated campaign budgets.

These
resources can then be better utilized for high-quality ad placements. Analyzing
the granular reports provide insights on further optimizing the campaign to
deliver an even better performance.

One of the
most popular targeting techniques – location-based targeting or Geo-targeting
can be employed to reach out to the voters of a constituency with communication
that is highly relevant to that constituency. This may involve understanding
and addressing the specific problems they face. Dynamic Creative Optimization
(DCO) can be used to deliver extremely personalized messages dynamically
curated for each voter, as per his/her run-time preferences. Further,
cross-device targeting can help politicians to reach the voters on multiple
devices. This helps in delivering consistent communication across all their
devices.

Conclusion

However,
the parties need to be cautious of brand safety issues, transparency problems
and ad fraud problems. If not taken care off, these can leech off the campaign
dollars causing huge losses to the party. In order to steer clear of these
problems, parties must ensure that they partner with the right programmatic
platform – the one which has brand-safety mechanisms, ad fraud detection and
prevention mechanisms and provides a good level of transparency.