Here lies a review of some of the key differences in the strategies behind the Republican (Donald Trump) and Democratic (Hillary Clinton) online advertising campaigns. In other words; (a) what is the target demographic for each of these two campaigns, and (b) how is each campaign reaching their potential voters.
The data below comes from the ad tech vendor Moat. Specifically, from its Moat Pro tool and it is shared with the kind permission of their CEO, Jonah Goodhart. While often thought of as just a viewability and invalid traffic technology provider, as can be seen by the depth of the data below, it does more than viewability.
Caveat 1 - Reviewing Objectively, not Subjectively
It has been very difficult to suspend judgement whilst writing this article. The goal of the article isn't to believe that one candidate is better or worse or right or wrong. The purpose of this evaluation is to gain powerful insights about your competitors online digital strategy.
Caveat 2 - Reviewing Activity, not Cost
This application, Moat Pro, collects information about digital advertising campaigns that are currently online. It continuously collects data from hundreds of thousands of global websites. The type of information that it collects is about the amount of "activity" that each campaign generates. For instance, campaigns that have a large number of ad impressions over a wide number of sites would have a high level of activity versus campaigns that only generate a small amount of ad impressions on a few websites would have a low level of activity.
It measures campaign activity but doesn't measure cost. For instance; some websites could charge as low as $1.00 CPM (cost per thousand) for their online advertising and other websites may charge $100.00 CPM. There is no way of knowing how much money each website charged to place the candidates campaigns on their pages. Therefore, in this analysis, it is assumed both candidates are buying their online advertising media at roughly the same average rates.
Caveat 3 - Reviewing Primary Campaigns Only
Each of the candidates have multiple, concurrent online campaigns. Each campaign may have a different branding message for the potential voter. For instance: Clinton's Primary campaign is called "Hillary Victory Fund" but she also had smaller campaigns such as "Hillary for America". Similarly, Trump's primary campaign is called "Donald J. Trump for President Inc." however, he also had smaller campaigns such as "Trump makes America great again". This analysis will only focus on each candidates primary campaigns.
- Hillary Victory Fund
- Donald J. Trump for President Inc.
Data Review 1 - Share of Voice between both Campaigns
The data set collected from Moat Pro coincided with the second presidential debate on Monday 10th October 2016. At that time Hillary had circa 55% of the online advertising activity whilst Trump collected the other 45%. This is very even and it shows that both parties are generally generating the same amount of advertising activity.
Interestingly enough, Hillary was very active for the one week prior to the debate with the activity ramping up on the 1st of October 2016. Conversely, Trump only increased his activity one day prior to the debate on the 9th of October 2016. From that point of view it would appear that Hillary was banking on a more "long term" brand building strategy whilst Trump's campaign had more of a "short term" strategic strike.
Each website can be classified into it's primary category. These categories include News, Travel, Finance etc... When reviewing these campaigns by website category, some interesting trends appeared.
- Category: News - Both candidates seem to an even amount of online campaign activity in the "News" category. This seems very logical.
- Category: Entertainment - The Trump campaign dominated the "Entertainment" category with lots of activity dominating websites such as "moviefone.com".
- Category: Politics - The Hillary campaign dominated the Political categories with over 10% of her activity on websites such as "policito.com" and "nytimes.com" as apposed to Trump who only spent 0.27% in these categories.
Data Review 2 - Campaign: Donald J. Trump for President, Inc.
Analysis by Website
The top websites that the Trump campaign advertised on was World Net Daily. 7% of the campaign's total activity ran just on this single site. The website describes itself as "The largest Christian website in the the world" and Wikipedia says that the purpose of the website is to "exposing wrongdoing, corruption and abuse of power". According to SimilarWeb.com this site gets circa 15m visits a month.
Analysis by Website Category
As mentioned previously, both candidates had an even amount of campaign activity in the News category. The next most active category for the Trump campaign was "Arts and Entertainment" with 16% of the total campaign activity running on sites like "moviefone.com" and the entertainment section of "msn.com".
Analysis by Creative
One key difference in the campaigns is the large number of websites and the large number of creative that the Trump campaign contained. Specifically, this campaign had 164 unique creative running over 1,072 unique websites whilst the Hillary for America campaign had only half that amount. This suggests that the Trump campaign is a "broad reach" campaign trying to send a large number of messages to a wider group of potential voters.
Visually most all creative in the campaign had a picture of Donald Trump. They often have an american flag in the background and the colours in the creative were mostly red, white and blue. The only exception to the colour scheme was some black and white creative which seems to be part of a negative campaign towards Hillary.
Data Review 3 - Hillary Victory Fund
Analysis by Website
The Hillary campaign absolutely dominated news and politics websites such as "politico.com" and "nytimes.com". In total this represented 25% of the overall level of campaign activity running on these sites and conversely the Trump campaign had less than 1% of activity running on these sites.
Analysis by Category
The Hillary campaign seems to be tightly targeted around the News, Law and Politics sites and only 6% of campaign activity running on Entertainment sites. This is almost the complete inverse of the Trump campaign.
Analysis by Creative
The Hillary Victory Fund campaign had far fewer creative than the republican campaign. There were only 83 creative compared to the Trump 164 creative. It would appear that the messaging is designed to be more tightly targeted with fewer variations.
Visually the creative had brighter colours compared to the Trump campaign. Not all of the creative had a picture of Hillary and almost none of the creative had an American Flag.
As mentioned previously, this article isn't a review if one candidate is better or worse or right or wrong. It's simply a different look on the American Election based on their current online advertising strategies.
In summary:
- Hillary Clinton's campaigns seem to be focused on reaching a tight audience with a specific positive message designed to build a long-term branding effect.
- Donald Trump's campaign seems to be focused on reaching a wide audience with a mix of nationalist messages designed to drive a short-term voting instinct.
It will be interesting to see if these advertising campaigns help win votes in the upcoming election. Only time will tell.
By GroupM's director of technical operations, Timothy Whitfield