The 2023 AAPC Pollies Awards are here and we're honored to announce that we won SILVER for Best Use of Mobile Technology!
Our work with Florida's Osceola County Republican Party led to a silver award for Best Use of Mobile Technology. They used our innovative self-serve digital ad platform to run a mix of persuasion and geofence campaigns weeks before the election. This resulted in four of six targeted candidates winning and a percentage increase in the Republican vote.
Bringing Programmatic to the People
Our voter-targeted, self-directed digital advertising platform puts the highest caliber digital advertising technology available into the hands of candidates, campaigns, and causes, no matter their size or budget. By taking tools designed and perfected for top of the ticket campaigns and democratizing them for every candidate and cause, politics truly became a bit more local.
How Our Voterfile Targeted Digital Advertising Platform Changed the Game
RepublicanAds.com combines voter targeting solutions, programmatic advertising technology, and near real-time customized reporting within a streamlined interface that doesn’t require additional advertising training or experience. In as little as six steps, a candidate can go from the login page through the launch of a targeted digital campaign to any universe. Couple that with no up-front costs or setup fees, and it’s no wonder why the platform signed up 87 accounts that went on to launch 587 campaigns it’s first year in operation.
By harnessing the power of programmatic advertising (as opposed to fixed placements), campaigns can deliver their messages to precisely the voters they desire, no matter where these voters go online. Powered by the latest innovations in automation, and DSP agnostic, the platform serves as a force multiplier by providing the skill and experience of an entire advertising operations team without the cost. Traditionally, these campaigns looking to bring this technology into their own races needed big budgets, expensive consultants, and a deep knowledge of digital advertising. RepublicanAds.com changed the industry standard by developing an effective and efficient platform that allows candidates up and down the ballot to serve display, pre-roll, and CTV ads to the exact voters they want in less than 10 minutes. No digital advertising experience needed.
In addition, with a real-time media planning tool and near real-time reporting, campaigns can see their ad spend, digital ad performance, and key campaign metrics that let them make an apples-to-apples comparison across all outreach efforts (not just digital!).
Precision Voter Targeting
Besides putting the most advanced digital advertising technology into the hands of campaigns up and down the ballot, our voterfile matched audience lists and custom audience builder are available at no additional cost to our clients. By matching the voter file to the most recent data from multiple industry-leading sources, then parsing that data into custom lists that include organizing voters based on a selected geography, district, or precinct, a candidate can easily send a custom message to nine different pre-built voter audiences (persuasion, swing, strong) with the literal click of a button. Our platform also easily integrates custom audience data with match rates above 85%. Our proprietary matching system takes a campaign’s data and matches it to IP addresses, mobile device IDs, cookies, and lat-long coordinates to produce an average match rate greater than 85% within a few hours.
During the campaign, the combination of identifiers is used to produce the best results in reach and scale automatically. These lists are saved to their account, so they can easily create multiple campaigns for their unique target audiences.
Case Study
Osceola County
While the Osceola County Republican Executive Committee (OREC) historically had a strong volunteer and fundraising operation, they continued to fall short of their electoral goals. With increased fundraising late in the cycle, they decided to use our firm’s voterfile targeted digital advertising platform to reach key voters because of its ease of use and ability to deliver effective results no matter a campaign’s budget. Leveraging our platform’s ability to serve digital audience persuasion campaigns and geofence campaigns, OREC embarked on a two-phase digital messaging strategy using RepublicanAds.com.
Phase One: Persuasion
Using RepublicanAds.com, OREC launched several digital persuasion campaigns to support a broader GOTV campaign and increase name ID for several underfunded down-ballot candidates among persuadable voters. Our prebuilt audiences combined nine different audiences (weak party affiliation, strong party affiliation, swing, GOTV, etc.) to create the exact audience needed. These audiences are not only matched to the voterfile and combined with several top-tier databases, but they also automatically exclude voters who have already voted, ensuring that campaigns are only spending money on the voters they need to win.
Phase Two: Geofence
On Election Day, OREC served geofence campaigns to 16 precincts. Our technology takes these campaigns and exclusively serves ads to everyone within 300ft of each polling location – ensuring that a candidate’s ad is the last one voters see as they wait in line, scrolling on their phone.
This innovative use of technology was proven in Osceola County, Florida to be effective, impactful, and cost-efficient. The combined result of these two campaigns resulted in four of six targeted candidates winning and a percentage increase in the Republican vote. These wins include:
Carolina Amnesty, Florida House District 45
Paula Stark, Florida House District 47
Melissa Palomino, Overoaks Community Development Council
Debbie Allen, Overoaks Community Development Council
In the past, Osceola County Republicans have relied on traditional methods of grassroots voter contact, neighborhood canvassing, phone banks, and mail have been our methods for years. I was intrigued by this specific platform after seeing their ads and decided to use them for digital advertising and precinct geotargeting after being contacted by one of their strategists. This allowed us to [digitally] send a ‘Vote Republican’ slate card across the county and to targeted precincts and support underfunded down ballot candidates who won on Election Day. They were an important part of our victory strategy. OREC Chairman Mark Cross
Whether a campaign’s goal is increased name recognition, persuasion, or GOTV, our platform has a proven record of success. No matter the level of the campaign, or the size of the budget, RepublicanAds.com brings industry-leading technology to candidates and causes up and down the ballot.
Want to use this Pollie Award Winning technology in your campaign or consulting agency?
About the Pollie Awards
The Pollie Awards (Pollies) are bipartisan honors awarded annually by the American Association of Political Consultants (AAPC) to members of the political advertising and communications industry who have demonstrated superior work on behalf of their candidates and causes. A blind jury of professional peers selects AAPC award winners. Esquire magazine has dubbed the Pollies “the Oscars of political advertising”.
The full list of 2023 Pollie Contest winners can be found in the 2023 Winners Book.
About AAPC
Founded in 1969, the AAPC is a multi-partisan organization of political and public affairs professionals dedicated to improving democracy. The AAPC has over 1,600 members hailing from all corners of the globe. It is the largest association of political and public affairs professionals in the world. For more information, see theaapc.org.