Political Media Agency Wins Local Race with Vibe

A New Orleans-based political digital media agency specializing in video production and digital ad-buying recently launched a campaign with Vibe focused on the last 2 weeks of one of their clients’ run for Parish Council. 

Their CTV campaign came at the tail end of an integrated digital strategy to get voters out early in a hotly contested election. Because local elections have some of the poorest voter turnout rates of any race, especially in Louisiana, the campaign was squarely aimed at getting “souls to the polls,” as they say. At the same time, the candidate represented by our client was surprised when a colleague from a neighboring parish decided to throw his name in the race and turn it into one of the most hotly contested local elections that year.

The agency had to develop assets and strategies that would reach large numbers of voters (to improve overall turnout) while hyper targeting their candidate’s base: independents, homeowners, and higher income earners (to differentiate himself from his opponents). 

They chose to work with Vibe because of our simple self-serve tools and transparent, in-depth reporting dashboard. In a volatile political environment, real-time optimization and creative agility are paramount, but haven’t historically been available to television advertisers. With Vibe, unskippable, large format commercials can be edited, targeted, and tracked as easily as any other piece of digital content. 

Let’s see how we did!

The candidate’s team needed to make 3 main points in their CTV campaign:

He needed a way to bring awareness to the overall election while remaining top of mind as a successful incumbent and candidate. His digital agency had solid video assets to deploy across digital channels, but recent regulations around political advertising on social media and some search platforms, along with general signal loss due to Apple’s ATT (App Tracking Transparency) framework limited their ability to target and reach high value audiences. 

Ultimately, the agency decided to explore Connected TV Advertising with Vibe in order to deploy unskippable video ads in targeted living rooms across their district. 

They further ensured those audiences interacted with their candidate in a brand safe, engaging manner by working programmatically with a premium inventory of over 500 streaming apps and channels, safe from unsavory UGC (User Generated Content) videos and mute buttons. 

Political advertisers are notoriously risk-averse, looking to repeat winning formulas over and over (why are we still receiving hundreds of mailers every election cycle?!), but this digital agency already had a leg up on the competition thanks to their full videography offering. 

All it took was some simple editing to make existing video assets work for CTV thanks to Vibe’s ACR (Automatic Content Recognition) feature which granted creative approval to the candidate and his agency in minutes.

Once assets were squared away, the team focused on their targeting strategy, which included audience and channel selection. 

Audience selection

Vibe’s vast audience targeting (and retargeting) offerings allowed the team to target the following segments with hyper-precision: 

Channel selection

Vibe offers over 500 premium channels to work with. In this case, the agency wisely targeted channels with massive reach and low CPMs, like Xumo and Tubi while also delivering their ads on local channels like FOX 8 WVUE New Orleans and news apps like FoxNews and NewsON. Wide reach allowed those ads to bring home their “get to the polls!” message while local and news focused channels furthered the candidate’s more specific talking points and authenticity. 

Thanks to Household IP targeting, every impression made an impact and ads with explicit political messaging and CTAs were allowed to air, as opposed to:

As impressions rolled in, spend remained in line with budgetary expectations and targeting was adjusted in real-time, yielding elevated voter engagement thanks to CTV’s relatively low ad load vs linear (4 to 5 minutes of ads on CTV vs 16 minutes in linear). 

The political advertising agency team developed a winning CTV campaign with Vibe by combining broad channel and geo-location delivery with hyper-targeted audiences, helping their candidate sweep his district!

Their Vibe campaign provided the candidate with invaluable incremental reach over existing digital strategy and linear TV buys. 

Their broad approach to inventory selection allowed them to achieve a staggering $0.05 CPV (Cost Per View) while relevant audience selection kept viewers engaged. 

Rounding out a political campaign with a 98% VTR (View Through Rate) when social media channels are shooting for 15% must have felt pretty good, especially as viewers get increasingly vocal about their distaste for campaign ads. 

As ever, what matters most is that the candidate won; but this kind of victory will continue to happen, pushing Streaming TV Advertising ever further into the political advertising nucleus.