2016 Political Web Ad Explosion

The 2016 presidential election may become the first election where more campaign advertising dollars are spent for social media and other web ads than for newspaper ads, direct mail, or telemarketing. If predictions are correct, web advertising spending pegged at almost $1 billion will be second after television/cable advertising spending.

In a Reuters report released Tuesday, online political advertising is projected to quadruple by 2016.

Predictions for 2016 show online advertising will consume only 8 percent of media budgets, or $955 million. But the growth is substantially up from $270 million in 2014 and just $14 million in 2010.

The main decision point for social media and other web ads is which voters will see what ads. Candidates have more tools than ever to micro target specific specific type of message specific types of voters.

Web ad targeting works like this: First, partisan data firms, like i360 and Data Trust on the right and Catalist and TargetSmart on the left, compile detailed analytic databases with demographic and geographical information on about 190 million registered voters.

Next, digital targeting firms like DSPolitical, CampaignGrid, and Targeted Victory, relate voter data to commercially available data like Internet tracking histories and real estate and tax records.For example: That, allows a Democratic candidate to display targeted web ads to voters in Dallas who had typed “climate change” into Google or typed “Democrat” in their Facebook profile.