1. HOW ONLINE ADS MOVE VOTES IN
POLITICAL CAMPAIGNS
A STUDY OF
TH
FLORIDA’S 11 CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT
IN THE 2010 ELECTION CYCLE
BY THE CALIFORNIA GROUP

2. TABLE OF CONTENTS
Executive Summary Page 3
Background Page 5
Experimental Method and Survey Page 7
Methodology
Key Findings Page 12
Conclusions Page 20
Appendices
Authors’ Bios Page 21
Methodological Issues Page 23
Example of Digital Ad Used Page 25
Campaign Grid Targeting Techniques Page 26
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3. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Studies show that political campaigns spend considerably less on online
advertising as a percentage of their total ad buy than do commercial advertisers.
However, projections for 2010 showed that online ads would make up less than
1% of all campaign advertising dollars spent1, but the same digital media was
predicted to outpace in 2010 the 12.9% market share it comprised in the
commercial world in 2009.2
Campaigns, with their smaller budgets and restricted time frames, can ill-afford to
spend money on a medium that does not give high impact. On the other hand,
when engaged in a zero-sum competition, can campaigns afford to not use a
medium that gives an advantage, even a small one?
Our study of the impact of 14 million impressions of a negative online message
by Republican challenger Mike Prendergast against Rep. Kathy Castor (D, FL-
11) in the last eight days of a Florida Congressional campaign shows the
following:
Online Advertising Changes Votes
! Four percent of the electorate who could recall the message delivered via
online ads – i.e. those for whom the message was “burned in” – changed
their vote over the course of the campaign in favor of Prendergast. NOTE:
in the 2010 cycle, 31 races in the House of Representatives were decided
by 4% of the vote or less.
! Measured another way, in a post-election survey, those voters who could
recall the message – those for whom the message was burned in – voted
for Kathy Castor at a rate 8 percentage points less than those who could
not recall the message.
Online Advertising is Highly Targetable
! Within the targeted audience, Republican men, survey respondents being
able to recall the message went from 4% to 22% over the course of the
eight-day online ad campaign.
1
Borrell Associates, 2010 Political Advertising Outlook: The Endless Campaign (Feb ’10)
2
USA Today Social Media Lounge, May 14, 2010 “Advertising Spending Looks Up in 2010”
3

4. Online Advertising is Highly Targetable (cont’d)
! The percent of Republican men who were able to identify Kathy Castor
with the message went from 53% in the initial poll to 68% in the final poll.
! In the post-election poll, Republican men were the demographic sub-
group that most associated Kathy Castor with the message. Sixty-eight
percent of Republican men associated the negative men with Castor.
Online Advertising Has a Significant Impact at the Last Minute
! In the above example of Republican men recalling the message, it took
9.3 million targeted impressions and six days of advertising to get a seven
percentage point increase from 4% to 11%; it took an additional 5.3 million
impressions over two days to get an additional 11 percentage points
recalling the message, to 22%.
! Among all voters, the rate of increase was shallower but still substantial.
The increase of all voters being able to recall the message phrase rose 3
percentage points with the first six days and 9.3 million targeted
impressions and another 3 percentage points with the next 5.3 million
impressions and two days of advertising.
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5. BACKGROUND
Prior to the advent of the Internet, the newest technology in voter contact came
with the use of television. Perhaps one of the first and still one of the most
famous television commercials was the Lyndon B. Johnson “Daisy” commercial
in 1964, which, ironically, was aired only once by the campaign, but aired
hundreds of times on television newscasts.3 The Internet has yet to have such a
moment.
Despite the early impact of TV commercials such as “Daisy,” it wasn’t until nearly
twenty years later that political consultants were able to fully quantify the impact
of television commercials on public opinion. This study was modeled after efforts
in the early eighties in California and elsewhere that refined the use of television
commercials.
California, with its large campaign budgets and twelve distinct media markets,
lent itself to such experimentation. The 1982 Pete Wilson for U.S. Senate
campaign against then ex-governor and now current governor Jerry Brown was
at the forefront of these efforts. The Wilson campaign tested a unique message
in a distinct market. A unique message is defined as a message not being used
in that media market in any other medium. A distinct media market might be one
such as Fresno or Monterrey that, at the time, did not get broadcast stations from
any other market.
The Wilson campaign conducted a baseline poll of the awareness of the
message in that market. An example might be “Do you agree or disagree with
the statement ‘Jerry Brown is soft on crime,’” which, for the sake of argument,
might get a 25% agreement. Then the campaign would run television ads
illustrating that Jerry Brown was soft on crime in the media market and use
tracking polls to assess the results.
The Wilson campaign found that once you put 600 gross rating points of media
behind an ad – that is to say, once you aired an ad a sufficient number of times
that everyone in the market had theoretically seen the ad six times – it “moved
numbers.” To move numbers might mean that a later poll would show a 35%
agreement with the agree/disagree question. In political parlance, the change in
voters’ opinions about Brown’s stance on crime would be called “burning in the
3
The Daisy commercial featured a four year old girl picking petals off of a flower and counting
them as she does so. When she reaches nine, her voice changes to a male voice counting down
a missile launch. The camera freezes on her face, and zooms in to her pupil, blacking out the
screen. A mushroom cloud consumes the screen as the male voice reaches zero. Johnson’s
voice enters in a voice over saying: "These are the stakes! To make a world in which all of God's
children can live, or to go into the dark. We must either love each other, or we must die." Another
male voice follows with "Vote for President Johnson on November 3. The stakes are too high for
you to stay home."
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6. message.” The standard is now 1000 gross rating points, owing to the public’s
increased resistance over the last thirty years to political messaging, fracturing of
the national consciousness with cable TV and the internet, and in general the
stronger competing demands for Americans’ attention in 2010 vs. 1982.
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7. EXPERIMENTAL METHOD & SURVEY METHODOLOGY
George Gorton was the lead consultant on the Pete Wilson for U.S. Senate
campaign in 1982. In 2010, Google contracted with Gorton’s firm, The California
Group, to adapt the methodology used in the television era to the Internet.
Gorton hired Steven Moore, a pollster with experience in large-scale, non-
traditional polling and a pioneer in online advertising for political purposes, to
help with the study.
Florida’s 11th Congressional District was home to a second term Democratic
incumbent defending against a long shot GOP challenger in a fairly strong
Democratic district. Mike Prendergast, a retired Army colonel, ran against Rep.
Kathy Castor.
District Profile
District: FL-11
Democratic Incumbent: Kathy Castor
Republican Challenger: Mike Prendergast
Cook PVI Rating: D+11
Barack Obama 2008 Vote: 66%
2008 Election Result
Castor (D) 71%
Adams (R) 29%
2010 Election Result
Castor (D) 60%
Prendergast (R) 40%
Campaign Committee Spending
Castor (D) $357,492
Prendergast (R) $496,080
Independent Expenditure Spending None
The Prendergast campaign agreed to use a unique, negative message.
A “unique, negative message” is a message that a) was being used only online;
the message was not being used in any other medium (TV, radio, mail, etc.)
while the test was being conducted and b) was being targeted at the opponent
and designed to decrease the opponents’ favorable rating and increase the
opponent’s unfavorable rating. We chose negative messaging because, in other
forms of voter contact, negative messaging about the opponent penetrates more
quickly and effectively than positive messaging about the candidate. We
assumed the same would hold for digital ads.
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8. The message the campaign chose was one of wasteful spending. Specifically,
Castor voted for a program that would spend $71,000 to study the effects of
cocaine on monkeys. In a baseline poll of CD 11 voters, this message made
49% of all voters less likely to vote for Kathy Castor, and 80% of Republican men
less likely to vote for Kathy Castor. The creative for the ads featured the phrase
“Does your monkey need rehab?” (see Appendices for examples of the banner
ads).
The message that Castor voted for a program that would spend $71,000 to study
the effects of cocaine on monkeys had not been used in paid media by the
Prendergast campaign prior to the test. Neither had it been used effectively in
earned media. A search of the Tampa Tribune website yielded one reference to
the program, on March 16 of 2010.
Regardless of the awareness of the program prior to the test, the specific
message phrase “Does your monkey need rehab?” had not been used in any
form of media – paid or earned – by the Prendergast campaign.
We conducted a benchmark survey (n=400) on October 24th, 25th and 26th. The
purpose of this survey was to establish a baseline for voter opinions in the areas
we would be testing.
We conducted tracking polling (n=200 nightly) on October 29th, 30st and 31st in
advance of the November 2 election.
Finally, we conducted a post-election survey (n=400) on November 3rd and 4th.
In compliance with FEC regulations, the results of the poll were not shared with
the campaign prior to Election Day.
We wanted to test changes in at least four areas: 1) change in awareness of
Internet advertising 2) change in favorability ratings among those who had seen
the ads 3) change in voting behavior among those who had seen the ads and 4)
effectiveness of “burning in” a message.
Although we tested awareness of Internet advertising by asking respondents
directly, this is among the least important of the data we are measuring.
The typical cycle of negative political advertising (independent of media) is as
follows:
1) voters receive negative information about Candidate A via a political
advertisement by Candidate B
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9. 2) the voters’ opinions of both candidates decrease; Candidate A drops because
of the negative information and Candidate B drops because most people don’t
like people who say negative things about other people
3) voters forget the vehicle for the negative information about Candidate A and
just remember the negative information
4) the voters’ opinion of Candidate B returns to around what it was prior to the
delivery of the negative ad
5) the voters forget the negative information, and are just left with a negative
impression of Candidate A.
In addition to the California Group’s thirty-year experience, this cycle for negative
political television ads is confirmed by other studies. According to a 1998 study
by the University of Missouri School of Journalism:
Janet Mullins, the 1988 Bush campaign's media director, claimed that
"everybody hates negative ads; then they rate them most effective in
terms of decision making. There isn't any long term effect . . . It is kind of
like birth pains. Two days later, you forget how much it hurt. The same is
true for negative advertising . . ."4
People rarely admit to being influenced by political advertising, yet campaign
cycle after campaign cycle shows that political advertising moves numbers. As
such, the most important data is the change in favorability, change in voting
behavior, and amount to which the message was burned in.
If poll respondents deny seeing an ad, but their opinions about a candidate have
changed in a direction that corresponds with the message of the ad, we have to
assume that the ad is effective and respondents are either deceiving the
interviewer about the source of their opinions to make themselves look good, or
the respondents simply have forgotten the source of their opinion.
Similarly, in our study, the final poll showed that the message was burned in
among 22% of the campaign’s target audience, Republican men. That is to say,
in the final poll, 22% of Republican men could recall the message, while only
17% of Republican men in the final poll reported having seen an Internet ad by
either candidate. As stated previously, the online ad was the only media by
which the very specific message “Does your monkey need rehab?” be received,
yet thirty percent more Republican men reported receiving the message than
reported seeing the medium through which the message was transmitted.
One of the most common criticisms offered by detractors of the effectiveness of
online advertising for political campaigns is based on a standard survey question
4
http://www.scripps.ohiou.edu/wjmcr/vol02/2-1a-B.htm
9

10. on campaign surveys asking respondents if they have seen, read, or heard
something about Candidate A’s campaign, and then ask where the respondent
got that information. Respondents to such surveys tend to name online ads less
frequently as a source of information about the campaign, regardless of how
much is spent on online advertising.
However, our findings seem to indicate that people lose recall of the source of
the information they receive from online ads rather quickly and retain just the
information, which is in line with what practitioners know and academics write
about the cycle negative advertising. As such, data indicates that the standard
seen/read/heard question used frequently by campaign pollsters is not a good
indicator of the effectiveness of digital ads.
The Online Buy
The vendor who created and placed the online advertising was CampaignGrid,
the largest online advertising platform dedicated exclusively to political
campaigns and causes. The firm placed several different types of online
advertising including banner ads placed on general interest, social media, news,
entertainment, email portals and political sites as well as Google search text ads.
Grid targeted registered voters using its proprietary voter data driven ad platform
to burn in the message to first time viewers of the ad, and re-targeted people who
clicked on the ads and visited the campaign’s website (see Appendix III).
CampaignGrid managed more than 140 online campaigns nationwide during the
2010 cycle, including 76 general election races, among them Sharron Angle for
U.S. Senate in Nevada, Christine O’Donnell for U.S. Senate in Delaware, and
Richard Burr for U.S. Senate in North Carolina, as well as 55 House races and 9
local races.
10

11. The buy for the Florida campaign yielded more than 14 million impressions over
8 days, or an average of 1.8 million impressions/day. The advertising buy was
back-loaded, so voters in the last days of the campaign would see more
impressions than they saw in the first days of the buy. Following is a chart of
impressions per day:
For perspective on the size of the buy and the pacing of impressions, the
Prendergast campaign was above the mean among CampaignGrid’s total client
base when measured in terms of impressions per day, but was below the mean
in terms of total impressions. This latter measurement is largely because of the
length of the campaign. The final three days, on an impression-per-day basis,
was considerably above the mean.
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12. KEY FINDINGS
Internet advertising changes the opinions of voters.
We compared the poll results over
time (for instance, between the
initial and post-election polls), and
internally within the final poll to
gauge the impact of the online
advertising. Both methods
confirmed the effectiveness of
online ads.
All Voters, Measured Over Time
Among all voters, the rate at which
respondents reported having heard
the phrase “Does your monkey
need rehab?” went from 8% in the
initial poll to 12% in the final poll
(n=400 in both cases), a 4
percentage point increase.
Perhaps more profound is that
those who were able to label
Kathy Castor as the politician
most likely to be associated with
a program to spend $71,000 on
the effects of cocaine on
monkeys increased 30%
percent over time. In an open
ended question, respondents
increased by six percentage
points, from 20% to 26%.
12

13. The biggest change, though, occurred in the questions when respondents were
given a choice between the two named Congressional candidates. Those who
identified Castor with cocaine monkeys went from 28% in the first poll to 36% in
the final poll, an 8 percentage point increase. Under the same parameters,
Prendergast remained statistically unchanged, going from 12% to 13%.
While 4%, 6%, and 8% are not as large of movements as those currently
associated with television, the movements are consistent in direction and the
data proves the effectiveness of digital ads to change voters’ opinions. Again,
the Internet is not yet the campaign howitzer that television advertising is, but the
outcomes of 31 House races decided in the 2010 by 4% or less could have been
changed by the skillful application of digital ads.
All Voters, Measured Within the Final Poll
Looking at the polls internally yielded similar results, albeit with smaller sample
sizes and a much higher margin of error.
Among all voters who had seen the Internet ads (n=56), the vote on the final poll
was 58% for Castor to 42% for Prendergast – a four-point swing when compared
to actual election results.
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14. 2010 Elec tio n
Results
4 point swing in Prendergast’s Favor
Looking at the results from another angle (below), those voters who had seen,
read, or heard the phrase “Does your monkey need rehab?” – those with whom
the message was burned in (n=55) – voted for Castor at a rate of 53%. Those
survey respondents with whom the message was not burned in voted for Castor
at a rate of 61%.
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15. Those voters who had seen, read or heard the phrase “Does your monkey need
rehab?” had a 51-38 fav/unfav for Kathy Castor (n=55), while those who had not
seen/read/heard the phrase had a 52-27 fav/unfav for Kathy Castor (n=346).
That is to say, among those voters who had not seen seen/read/heard the
message phrase, Castor was +25 favorable to unfavorable rating. Among those
voters who had seen/read/heard the message phrase, Castor was limited to a
+13 favorable to unfavorable rating.
This change in Castor’s favorable to unfavorable ratio is largely a factor of
Castor’s unfavorable rating increasing 11 points among those who had seen,
read or heard the phrase “Does your monkey need rehab?” As one might
expect, when the negative message against Castor is burned in, Castor’s
negative rating goes up.
Castor Fav Castor Unfav Fav – Unfav
had not s/r/h message phrase 52 27 +25
s/r/h message phrase 51 38 +13
Change -1 +11 -12
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16. Digital advertising is dexterous and precise in terms of targeting.
Not surprisingly, those
demographics to which the
advertising was targeted were
the demographics in which
opinions were changed most
significantly.
Our initial poll showed that
Prendergast had the vote of
only 77% of the Republicans,
and 74% of the Republican +1 8
men. The campaign must Increase
have been seeing the same
thing, and felt that in the final
days of the campaign the
candidate both had room to
grow with Republican men,
and that this would be a good
group to motivate for voter
turnout. As such,
CampaignGrid designed its campaign to target Republican men. (for a detailed
discussion of CampaignGrid’s targeting techniques, see Appendix IV)
The percentage of Republican men who reported having seen, read or heard the
phrase “Does your monkey need rehab?” increased from 4% in the first poll to
22% in the second poll, for a net change of 18 percentage points and an increase
of 550% between the first and final polls.
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17. When given a choice of the two Congressional candidates with whom to
associate spending $71,000 to study the effects of cocaine on monkeys,
Republican men associated Castor at a rate of 53% initially, and 68% in the final
poll. The percentage associating Prendergast dropped 4 points from 9% to 5%.
Of the two candidates running for Congress in your Congressional district, Kathy Castor and Mike
Prendergast, which of the candidates would you associate with voting for a program to spend
$71,000 of taxpayer money to fund a study of the effects of cocaine on monkeys?
+1 5
Increase
The percentage of Republican men voting for Prendergast increased from 74%
to 82% between the initial poll and the post-election poll.
17

18. Internet advertising is effective at the last minute.
One of the most surprising findings of the study was that Internet advertising can
make a significant difference in a short amount of time. And, unlike methods of
voter contact such as mail and television, Internet advertising needs very little
lead-time to be introduced into a campaign, and as such can be created, targeted
and served as late as Election Day itself.
As shown in the chart below, GOP men who had received the message
increased by seven percentage points over five days of advertising that yielded
some 9.3 million impressions. Over the last two days, the percentage of GOP
men with whom the message was burned in jumped eleven percentage points as
the campaign showed more than 5.3 million impressions.
The cause of the dramatic increase over the last two days is difficult to ascertain
with certainty. In the last two days, 2.5 million impressions per day were served
vs. 1.6 million impressions per day in the first six days, which could account for
the increase. This is particularly true if the last three days are counted as a
group, which is a reasonable thing to do, as the 11% polling number on 10/31
was generated by three days of n=200 polling – 10/29, 10/30, 10/31. Such a
grouping would create a 3 to 1 difference in the impressions per day for 3.0
million impressions on the last three days and 1.1 million impressions for the first
five days. This would imply that burning in an ad with a target audience is simply
a function of packing impressions into days and increasing the frequency with
which a target audience sees an ad.
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19. Another theory as to the reason for the dramatic increase over the last two days
of the campaign parallels political television advertising. TV ads are well known
by practitioners to have a “hockey stick” type result on polls. Some media buyers
would say that if you air an ad with only 600 gross rating points behind it, you
might as well not do it, because all the benefits on a poll accrue from 800-1000
gross rating points. This would indicate that the necessary pre-requisite for the
dramatic results of the last two days was the number of impressions that were
served in the first six days.
Unlike television advertising, digital advertising can be adjusted in real time. If
one version of an ad is working better than another, then resources can instantly
be put behind the effective ad, increasing the efficiency of the buy. The
“learning” nature of the digital ad realm could be another reason for the hockey
stick shaped result.
In either case, achieving a 550% increase in message recall by a target audience
in the last 8 days of a campaign is a huge benefit to a campaign.
Comparing Digital Advertising to More Conventional Media
A value of online advertising not necessarily measured in polls that none the less
became apparent in this study is the ability to deploy messaging online long after
the window closes on sending mail or putting commercials on TV.
Typically, a TV commercial would need to be on air eight to ten days to get
enough GRPs behind it to burn in a message. Producing a TV commercial can
take as little as 24 hours or several days, depending on the production values of
the commercial. Getting the commercial in rotation at the television stations
takes time. As such, the last day to begin airing a TV commercial is probably ten
days to two weeks prior to Election Day. Some media consultants might argue
that you could compress the timeline to air a commercial and have it still be
effective, or that a more powerful commercial needs fewer GRPs, but one
thousand GRPs is the gold standard for airing a TV commercial.
Similarly, mail takes time to produce and deliver. Most mail vendors will require
a finalized mail design be in their office ten days prior to Election Day.
Digital advertising can be designed and online in hours, and the results of this
survey prove that a large media buy in the last days of a campaign can move
numbers. In this study, 5.3 million impressions in the last two days of the
campaign moved 3% of voters, and 11% of targeted voters. As noted earlier, 31
races in 2010 were decided by fewer than four percentage points.
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20. CONCLUSIONS
! This study proves that digital advertising changes the opinions of voters.
! Online advertising in its current form is much more precisely targetable
than broadcast media such as radio and television. The next generation
of digital advertising will be even more targetable, and the strategists and
vendors who capitalize on this most capably will be the next cycle’s
leaders in the world of political online advertising. Campaign Grid, for
instance, is already working on a platform to incorporate consumer data
and voting behavior into targeting for online advertising.
! No other media can be deployed as quickly or effectively in the final ten
days of a campaign as digital media, with the possible exception of
automated phone calls. Longer digital media campaigns during earlier
phases of the election cycle are also effective, but those were not
measured here. As targeting becomes more sophisticated, the value of
digital advertising in persuading voters and ginning up turnout in the final
days of a campaign will increase greatly.
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21. APPENDIX I: Authors’ Bios
George Gorton
George Gorton’s political career spans four decades and three continents.
Most recently, Gorton was Arnold Schwarzenegger’s first political consultant,
masterminding Proposition 49, an $8 million statewide initiative campaign that
transformed Schwarzenegger, in the eyes of the electorate, from an action star to
the leading candidate for governor going in to the 2003 special election.
Gorton is also well known for leading a small group of American political
consultants who secretly advised Boris Yeltsin’s re-election campaign in 1996.
Gorton and his team brought Yeltsin from fifth place in the polls at six percent to
a thirteen point victory over his communist rival five months later. The campaign
was chronicled in a TIME Magazine cover story and the subject of “Spinning
Boris,” a Showtime movie in which Jeff Goldblum played Gorton.
Gorton has also played a strategic role in campaigns in Romania, Panama, the
Czech Republic and Canada.
During the eighties and nineties, Gorton was the innovator who ran all of Pete
Wilson’s statewide campaigns in California. Gorton helped quantify the impact of
television on public opinion through extensive testing of the medium during
Wilson’s campaigns in the eighties. Gorton created methodology which
determined how many gross rating points a campaign needed to put behind a
commercial in order to “burn in” a message.
Gorton’s political career started out as youth director for the William Buckley for
U.S. Senate campaign in New York. He subsequently was named national youth
director for President Nixon’s 1972 re-election campaign.
Steven E. Moore
Steven Moore is a Republican political strategist with extensive global polling
experience, having conducted surveys in Russia, Romania, Indonesia, Iraq, East
Timor and the United States.
While in Iraq, Moore designed and conducted a monthly 12,000 sample survey
during some of the most tumultuous times in that country. The complexities
involved in conducting a poll with a sample size ten to twelve times larger than a
typical national U.S. poll on a monthly basis using face-to-face interviews in a
country with no history of public opinion research during a shooting war are self-
evident. The General staff used the information gathered in the survey to assess
21

22. reconstruction efforts, gain insight into what Iraqis wanted in their government
and evaluate the effectiveness of US military "soft power" efforts.
Since returning from Iraq in 2006, Moore has been active in Congressional
campaigns, and has been recognized as an innovator in using online
communications to communicate with Congressional voters about issues
important to them.
Moore brings a unique approach and skill set to his endeavors, by utilizing
quantitative data to solve complex problems. His combination of quantitative
skills and online advertising innovator status made him uniquely qualified to
author this groundbreaking study. He was not involved in the Prendergast
campaign.
Formerly a partner in Gorton Moore International, Moore has been involved in
politics for more than twenty years.
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23. APPENDIX II: Methodological Issues
Testing Awareness of Negative Ads
Testing negative messaging posed a methodological challenge, but not one
uncommon to political surveys. When testing a positive message about, for
example, Mike Prendergast, one can simply ask, “Have you seen an Internet ad
about Mike Prendergast?” Such a positive ad is about Mike Prendergast and has
disclaimer language that says it is paid for by Mike Prendergast for Congress.
However, when testing a negative ad, the negative ad is about Kathy Castor but
is aired by Mike Prendergast for Congress. The subject matter of a negative ad
against Kathy Castor is, by definition, about Kathy Castor, but it was created and
paid for by Mike Prendergast. It even says so on the ad. So in analyzing the
results of the polls, we combined the respondents who said they saw the Castor
ad and the respondents who said they saw the Prendergast ad, then adjusted for
those who saw both ads. (see Venn diagram below) This was a particularly
effective solution in the Florida race given that Castor’s ad buy was negligible
next to Prendergast’s and no third parties were advertising on the Internet in this
race.
The blue circle represents those respondents who reported seeing the Castor ad.
The off white circle represents those respondents who report seeing the
Prendergast ad. Where the circle intersects is the group that has seen both ads.
Seventy-three respondents reported seeing one ad or the other, and seventeen
respondents reported seeing both ads. To accurately count penetration of the
ad, we need a count of those respondents who have seen either ad. These 17
that report seeing both ads are counted twice, in both the blue and the off-white
circles. The 37 that reported seeing the Castor ad is comprised of 20 who saw
the Castor ad only and 17 that saw both. The 36 that reported seeing the
Prendergast ad is comprised of 19 that saw the Prendergast ad only, and 17 that
saw both. Thus, the 17 is counted twice and the real number for those who have
seen either ad is 56.
23

24. Small Sample Sizes
One of the issues associated with examining a form of voter contact that reaches
between 15% and 30% of the electorate is that the sample size for subgroups
gets small rather quickly. However, we found that even using sample sizes that
might yield, say, a margin of error of seven or eight percent, all the numbers were
going in the same direction, yielding consistent trends, and increasing the
believability of our conclusions. Smaller sample sizes are identified in the
findings. We also tried to mitigate the impact of small sample sizes by merging
the tracking polls (n=600) with the data from the final poll (n=400). Obviously,
the larger overall sample size yields larger samples for sub-groups.
Accounting for “Phantom Reporting”
In the initial survey, we ask whether voters have seen Internet ads from either
candidate, and we get a positive response despite the fact that no Internet ads
had been run by either campaign at that point in the race. This can be
interpreted a couple of different ways: 1) voters are reporting having seen ads by
other candidates whose districts overlap with FL-11, such as ads for governor or
US Senate or 2) some small percentage of survey respondents will say anything.
For example, experience has shown that a candidate who has only recently
moved in to a district and done nothing to make voters aware of their candidacy
can still get a name ID of 10% or 15%. Just as voters will report knowing a
“phantom candidate,” it is possible they will also report a “phantom ad.”
Regardless of the reason for the phantom reporting in the initial poll, the question
becomes one of how to interpret subsequent polling – i.e. if 7% report seeing an
Internet ad when none was present, and a subsequent poll shows that 20%
report seeing the ad, do we assume a 7% “phantom number” in the subsequent
poll and report a “real” awareness of the ad of 13%? We chose not to. In the
example of the unknown candidate generating name ID in an initial poll, no
campaign we are aware of subtracts the phantom name ID generated in initial
polling when a subsequent poll is conducted for name ID in the presence of voter
contact efforts. Meaning, if an initial poll shows 15% name ID for candidate Bob
Anderson who moved in to Florida’s 22nd Congressional District three weeks prior
to the poll and has not conducted a campaign, and a subsequent poll conducted
after candidate Anderson has sent out five mail pieces shows him with 40%
name ID, no campaign would knock his name ID down to 25%.
In both the case of the candidate and the Internet ad, a subsequent poll does not
offer a way to distinguish between “phantom responses” and actual responses.
As such, a campaign has to assume that all responses are valid responses.
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25. APPENDIX III: Example of Digital Ad Used
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26. APPENDIX IV: Campaign Grid Targeting Techniques
CampaignGrid used several forms of targeting to reach Republican men.
1) Geographic targeting of Registered Votes
CampaignGrid used its state of the art technology and precision online targeting
to target registered voters in specific “voter zones”. (Note: voter zones are 2.5
times smaller than traditional zip codes and allow for more precise targeting ---
(see the “heat map” for Republicans in FL-11) Note that FL-11 is fairly mixed in
its partisan affiliation. Very little is strong Republican, and very little is strong
Democrat. Given the limited Republican strongholds in FL-11, CampaignGrid
also targeted using other methods.
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27. Retargeting
During the 2010 election cycle, CampaignGrid also created a massive targeting
and retargeting program, deploying cookies and then serving ads to those
cookied individuals, in conjunction with numerous conservative websites, such as
Fox News, allowing advertisers to reach directly self-identified conservative
voters. In Fl-11, 384,000 ads were served to people with conservative cookies
on their browser.
Site Targeting
Republican men visit certain sites. Among those sites targeted were AOL,
nbcsports.com, realclearpolitics.com, cnn.com, and townhall.com.
Keyword Targeting on Facebook
Facebook provides easy keyword targeting through users’ use of affinity groups –
Sarah Palin, Marco Rubio, America Speaking Out, Florida Republican Party, etc.
– and this approach was used by CampaignGrid to target ads.
About Campaign Grid
CampaignGrid's patent pending, online voter targeting platform, combines 187
million voter records with associated consumer data for each voter in the
electorate.
Real time data mining allows advertisers to microtarget an audience on the web
and cell phones using 172 different consumer and voting behaviors. Grid has
pioneered hyper-local data driven online targeting by mapping the electorate to
the web.
Interactive ads that feature static banners and videos are designed to list build,
fund raise and persuade. Real time feedback on which ads work are used to
optimize the ad campaign.
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