Long-Tail Nanotargeting - Tom Tancredo’s Online Ad Buys Earned an Unbelievable Return on Investment... Since Pat Caddell introduced message polling, the winning model for most down- ballot campaigns has been a one-size-fits- all message: Promote your candidate to his/ her best attributes, the opponent to his/her worst op-research line items, and then hammer home the message—usually on TV an mailers. But this model came from a time when the media audience was easy to find, segment and reach. The biggest problem? One-dimensionality. For years, people have been saying the Internet is a game changer. But you haven’t happen, has it? Sure it was great for Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump but their methods haven’t exactly translated down the ballot, have they? This narrative has tied the hands of new media types when we work with professionally run campaigns, because they tend to be salted with campaign pros who experimented unsuccessfully in the past. Until now, the campaigns willing to innovate have tended to be broke and hopeless. Conservative Tom Tancredo was different. Before I get into the details, one last appeal to the non-believers. The modern Internet bears little resemblance to the Internet you experimented with in cycles past. Change is happening so quickly that half of what a four- year technical …show more content…
With persuasion, you must first identify the most persuasive content available, then figure out who is most likely to be persuaded. When someone from your district searches for “Charter Schools” and you trigger an ad about the Michelle Malkin endorsement of your candidate, that’s a persuasion niche. With acquisition, you first identify the type of people you want to acquire, then figure out where they are and what to ask them for. When someone is reading an e-mail containing the phrase “NRA Newsletter” and you trigger an ad with a fundraising call to action, that’s