The Return of Old School Selling

As we’ve built our political ad-buying platform over the past few months Spot-On has noticed that more and more folks seem interested in the whole idea of abandoning the black boxes called part programmatic ad buying in favor of something more direct.

From Google on down, more players seem ready to acknowledge that programmatic ads hurt news sites, particularly local news sites which can never have the scale and reach of national platforms.

If you're looking at collecting political ad revenue this year, this is an important change, and one we fully endorse. Direct buying technologies will almost certainly make the voter matching technology that many campaigns rely on less accurate. Under the right circumstances, this makes direct buying more attractive - and more lucrative.

First, some disclaimers. Spot-On doesn't put a lot of faith in Google saying it no longer wants to control every aspect of digital ad buying. They didn't get to be a trillion-dollar business by playing nice. Nor do we think that buying scenarios like the ones spelled out by Trade Desk for its Open Path offering are going to help political buyers very much. Open Path feels more like a challenge to a weakness in Google's market dominance.

Still, we think there are several trends here to notice - just not the ones being touted from the rooftops. So let's start with Google's ideas about allowing advertisers to target their ads based on the perceived interest of the topics users explore on the web. This strategy is more general than the cookie-based targeting political advertisers rely on to match voters to ads, which raises an important question. Is a reader interested in political subjects just a political insider or influencer? That's not a swing voter; that's the base. And what about lag time? Google's idea uses hindsight. Elections - and the events leading up to them - can change fast in short time frames.

So Google's "Topics" would be implemented too late - after the election. Or it could be too focused; hitting people who care about politics for a climate change ballot measure but not showing that ad to people who care about conservation. The result? Targeting systems on automated digital buying platforms will be far less reliable for political and advocacy campaigns.

Then there's the big ad agency race to claim control over quality advertising. Putting aside Trade Desk (which is hard, it's as big a player in the market as Facebook or Google), other agencies are trying to secure high quality inventory on known outlets for their clients by cutting access deals with publishers to replace cookie-based tracking. The result is that the market is in danger of being split between the 'have access' and 'want access.’

There are some things that Spot-On likes about this trend. We have long maintained that political and advocacy advertising has no place on blind programmatic exchanges. And we’ve recently seen Xandr, the Microsoft-owned ad exchange, make this their policy.

It’s easy to see why. No one's happy with the current status quo. Buyers don't know where their ads are running; sellers don't know who's buying or what the ads are saying. And compliance with the law isn't equitable.

The Xandr announcement recognizes that political buyers ARE different. They're not brand advertisers; their needs, their placements and their timing is different. It's more compressed, more controversial and potentially as lucrative for websites as it is for TV stations.

Starting this week, Spot-On is opening up our Pinpoint Persuasion Automated Direct Buying platform to paying customers who want their ads to run on local sites. If you've got one of those - or several - drop us a line and we'll tell you what you need to do to increase your visibility with these paying customers.