The 2023 AAPC Pollies Awards are here and we're honored to announce that we won GOLD for Best Ad Technology Innovation!
Georgia Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger's campaign used RepublicanAds.com to run 23 campaigns with a multi-channel strategy (display, preroll, CTV) targeting a mix of pre-built and custom audiences. He effectively combatted attacks from both President Trump and President Biden, and reached the voters he needed - leading to a hard fought victory.
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 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 to have 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
Secretary of State
Our platform’s industry-leading technology, cost-effectiveness, and unique targeting options led Georgia Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger’s campaign to victory.
He won his four-way primary with 52.4% of the vote despite trailing in the polls (numbers in the low 30s in most polls), and attacks from President Trump. This was 19% higher than his closest opponent, Jody Hice, a Trump-endorsed candidate.
Even more remarkable, he won the nomination without a runoff – something pundits locally and across the country expected. Despite facing major adversity, our platform gave Raffensperger the unique ability to get in front of his audience quickly and effectively.
Winning Campaign Strategy
Raffensperger’s team ran 23 unique digital campaigns on our platform. They used a combination of display, pre-roll, and CTV to reach their Primary target audience, leaning heavily on pre-roll for its cost-effectiveness and widespread viewability. Leveraging pre-roll and CTV, the campaign used our unique voterfile matched audiences to increase the reach and frequency of their traditional TV ads and reach key targets with unique digital-only video messages. Combining the power of targeted programmatic advertising, the voter file, and several voter databases – candidates can more effectively send tailored messages to unique subsets of their key audience with our platform. This gave Raffensperger’s campaign the flexibility to highlight campaign points and unique endorsements to his key voters.
To refine their targeting strategy, the campaign used our prebuilt Republican Primary Audience (matched to the voterfile and frequently updated from several high-quality data sources) and a custom audience of 2 of 4 Republican Primary voters so they could over-index in a high-turnout primary. Creating this audience was also key as it was less likely to be receptive to Trump’s attacks and less likely to blindly support a Trump-endorsed candidate than more frequent primary voters. They also created a custom audience of 65+ Republican primary voters for a unique video messaging campaign about issues important to that group of voters. This allowed the campaign to target the exact audiences needed without wasting campaign funds. Instead of running blanket ads across a designated geo, they could serve ads that would resonate with their intended audience and exclude the rest.
Delivering a Win
After the Primary, Raffensperger faced attacks from President Biden and President Trump, an opponent with a significantly higher campaign budget, and an unprecedented amount of dark money funded attacks. Raffensperger’s campaign doubled down on its previous strategy with new custom audiences. Utilizing our platform’s innovative advertising technology, Raffensperger won the General with more than 53% of the vote and by the largest margin of victory of any other statewide candidate. He was also the best-performing statewide candidate among swing/unaffiliated voters and the best-performing Republican candidate overall in the Atlanta Metro area.
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 Gold 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.