Data and Democracy

Chapter 6. Digital Advertising in the Post-Obama Era

Daniel Scarvalone

Daniel Scarvalone is the Associate Director of Research and Data at Bully Pulpit Interactive (BPI). BPI serves as the largest digital marketer for the Democratic party as well as working for major corporations and causes. Before joining BPI, he served as Director of Data and Modeling at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 2014 and as National Reporting Director for the Obama 2012 campaign.

President Obama’s presidential campaigns revolutionized the way technology and data could be used together to identify and speak to voters’ interests, reflecting the increasingly sophisticated application of digital marketing to politics. But in this election cycle, and for the last 20 years, political campaigns still spend more than 70 cents of every dollar to reach voters via broadcast television. While broadcast TV is an effective medium to talk to voters and change minds, there is great debate about how cost-efficient it is.

In politics, there are countless conversations about the importance of matching the “red bar” (the amount of money the opposition is spending) to the “blue bar” (the amount of money our allies are spending), irrespective of cost. This arms race means TV stations can charge an exorbitant price for ad inventory, especially as Election Day approaches. And this paradigm completely overlooks the effects of ad frequency—i.e., whether the 30^th TV ad each week is as effective as the 10^{th ...}