Digital Advertising

In the ever-evolving landscape of digital advertising, Meta (Facebook and Instagram) remains a powerful platform for political campaigns, advocacy groups, and nonprofits to reach targeted audiences. However, Meta’s stringent policies on political and issue-based advertising have created challenges for advertisers looking to leverage these platforms effectively.

Understanding these restrictions—and how to work within them—is crucial for any organization running advocacy or political campaigns. Here’s what you need to know.

Digital video advertising continues to be a key tool in every political campaign’s toolbox, providing a potent combination of visual storytelling and emotional engagement. Whether it's social media or programmatic, the power of a great video ad cannot be overstated. In the ever-evolving landscape of political campaigns, understanding the nuances of digital video is crucial for a successful digital ad strategy.

Whether you’re running a political campaign or an advocacy program, geofencing can be an incredibly useful tactic within your larger campaign advertising toolbox. Geofencing is a method of targeting mobile ads to people within a tight geographic area.

When entering  the digital advertising world without any prior experience or  background in the field, one of the largest challenges you will face would be getting the hang of all of the digital advertising acronyms. Digital advertising has its own language DSP, DMP, CPM, CPA, CTR... What do all these ad terms mean?

Digital campaigns for political causes have come a long way since we ran our first one in 2003 for the League of Conservation Voters in Colorado. We created a pretty rudimentary animated flash ad of gas spewing out of a car driven by Pete Coors.

What are the best demand side platforms for advocacy or political campaigns? That depends on what your needs for digital campaigns are. How much staff capacity do you have? What are the budgets you’re looking to spend? Most vendors now also give you the option to have a dedicated member of their staff manage your campaign or will give you the keys to their demand side platform to manage your campaign yourself.

Native ads have become popular over the past few years, but can you use them for political campaign ads?

When planning your overall campaign strategy, political campaign ads play an important role, however they are not without their issues. One of the biggest problems with digital campaigns is that they are not tied closely enough to your overall campaign strategy. Digital tools are an important vehicle to help you reach your overall political goals and should be thought of as such.

Twitter announced that they will stop allowing political ads to run on its platform which has the potential to have further implications across the industry. Will other companies follow suit? Facebook has received a lot of flak lately from both the public and the government centered around political ads.

Today, we’ll talk about a little-known but very powerful tool for advocacy campaigns - the Youtube Brand Lift Study. Standard metrics such as views and clicks are great ways to track how many people have viewed and interacted with your video ads online.

Digital political ad transparency has been an elusive thing. In a world of fake news, hacked sites and independent expenditures from groups you have never heard of, actionable information on digital spending is important. For years, you have been able to find out what opponents are spending on television and radio. Now, digital publishers a re starting to focus on  digital ad transparency. They are making it easier to see what folks are doing with paid digital political ads.