The race to 2020 presidential elections saw a lot of new trends when it came to political ads – Bloomberg’s Meme 2020 project, where he partnered with popular Instagram accounts to create and share viral memes promoting his candidacy or Joe Biden’s partnership with influencers to reach a younger audience. Between all the ad channels, the total ad spending between the 2019-2020 election cycle reached an all-time high, with a $6.89 billion estimated spend, which is almost 65% higher than the spend between the 2015-2016 election cycle (eMarketer, 2019.)
Television, and specifically, linear TV, is still the preferred choice for campaign managers to reach an older audience like Baby Boomers. With younger audiences spending more time on mobile devices, the next obvious choice for political campaign managers is digital advertising. 2020 is going to see a massive turnout in young voters where more than 80% of college students are expected to cast their vote (48.3% higher than 2016.) Though the trend of using digital platforms for political ads started during the 2008 election cycle, it truly gained momentum in the last few years. So much so that in 2019 alone, presidential candidates spent upwards of $105 million on digital ads, out of which more than $65 million went to Facebook (CNBC, 2020).
Breaking this down further shows that on digital platforms, Facebook is the number one choice for campaign managers - accounting for more than 60% of the digital ad spend. The use of Facebook for promoting campaigns has let candidates reach their audience easily in real-time and has also allowed the general public to follow and interact with their elected officials, and their teams. It has allowed politicians to tailor the messaging to reach specific segments of the audience. The platform with the second-highest spend is Google, Youtube in particular. Youtube lets the campaign managers run the same ads as on TV but with a more granular targeting option.
Even though standard display advertising reaches far beyond the walled confines of Facebook and other social channels, it has been underutilized. One likely reason for this is that standard media has not evolved much in the past few years. Unlike social media, where candidates can use multiple features and also partner with influencers, display ads offer limited opportunities for campaign managers to engage with their target audience.
This is where Spaceback comes into the picture. With it’s ability to transport social media experiences into display placements across the Web, Spaceback brings the best of both worlds in a concept called Social Display. Social Display allows marketers to take the best content from their social platforms, and distribute it across a much wider slice of the Internet through standard display placements, providing a more authentic experience.
By integrating with leading DSPs like MediaMath, Spaceback allows campaign managers to access their target audiences at scale across the Web using their preferred programmatic tools. In May, Big Lens, a media consultancy firm, leveraged the Spaceback-MediaMath partnership for Virginia Senator Mark Warner’s re-election campaign. Despite a strong presence on Facebook and Instagram, the firm felt that their display creatives were lacking. With Spaceback, they were able to convert their highest performing social posts into Social Display and saw a 50% increase in CTR over standard banners with much lower CPMs!
“Spaceback Social Display units increase engagement, allow us to run video at lower CPMs than in-stream videos, and provide an easy way to develop more compelling creative. It’s a win, win, win!”
– Big Lens
In this critical campaign year, candidates on both sides of the aisle can also leverage Social Display to generate a higher voter engagement without compromising authenticity or paying higher CPMs while also being able to catalog and analyze the results and optimizing performance in real-time.
Whether you're running for office or running a business, Spaceback’s Social Display ads can help your campaign or company reach its true advertising potential.
