Political Advertising Tips

I traveled to Manhattan in May to attend the Adobe 99U Design Conference. I had never attended this type of conference before, so I was concerned it could be very brand forward and salesy. Luckily, it was not. In fact, it wasn’t anything I expected at all. Speakers were very philosophical, and workshop sessions were inspirational rather than technical. To be honest, some of it went over my head, but that was the point. To get us creatives to look up and into the future.

If you’re running political ads for your independent expenditure campaign, you already have to make extra sure that everything you’re doing and saying is legal. All of your content will likely need to be reviewed by lawyers, especially if it could be controversial. But one area that’s relatively new to this kind of review is making sure your digital ad accounts and/or pages have been verified to run political ads in the US.

Election meddling has made national news starting with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which took effect in Europe this summer. In response, many folks in the states took a look at their own privacy policies and laws surrounding political digital ads to see what they could do better to be more transparent. Companies like Google and Facebook created their own policies to verify users and target who was actually paying for political digital ads. Lawmakers in states across the country also started to pass laws to push for more transparency.