Political Advertising Online

Case study: AOL delivers massive engagement & awareness for political candidate

Challenge
During the primary season of the highly crowded 2008 presidential election, the agency representing a major national candidate approached AOL Advertising, looking to increase awareness for their client.
Our goal was to engage voters, publicize rallies, solicit donations, and ultimately encourage supporters to join the campaign.

Solution
Using our industry-leading reach, various targeting solutions and optimization technology, AOL Advertising designed a series of campaigns for the presidential hopeful:
First, a two-day NetBlock delivered massive, high-impact exposure among a large national audience.
Next, geographically targeted efforts gave the client the granularity and flexibility to seamlessly switch their targeting from one city (or state) to another based on the primary calendar, the candidate’s rally schedule and fundraising efforts.
Finally, a rich-media branding campaign was launched on select content channels (News, Personal Finance and Business), ensuring a 74.5% reach on relevant, premium content sites. This particular campaign was possible through AOL's partnership with PointRoll, offering the industry’s first solution for the optimization of rich media advertising based on interaction rates.
All these campaigns utilized our LeadBack technology to retarget users who had previously visited the candidate’s site or clicked on a banner, reinforcing the message with an interested audience.

Results
AOL Advertising reached up to 6.4 million unique users per day in over 200 cities and metro areas across more than 450 websites.
Record numbers of voters were engaged and driven to the candidate's site and ultimately encouraged to support the campaign by making donations and attending rallies.
Within a few days of the rich-media optimization campaign’s launch, results surpassed the client’s objectives - both in engagement and ‘cost-per-lead.’ After optimizing, the rich media campaign experienced double-digit increases across various critical metrics.