The TV Efficiency Revolution

Coming out of the 2012 presidential election, big data was the talk of the town. It has caused a wave of change, resulting in organizations building technology, acquiring data and learning the statistical software R—a free software for statistical computing and graphics. Caught up in this wave is how the biggest line item in any campaign budget is being scrutinized: television.

Traditionally, TV is the largest piece of any campaign budget, and for the first time its effectiveness in reaching voters was being questioned. Most campaigns have relied on a gross rating point (GRP) model to determine reach and frequency of a television buy. The Obama campaign made an effort to change this model by using the “optimizer” to find what persuadable voters were watching across hundreds of television networks. This new strategy dramatically changed the way they bought television. Instead of trying to reach an arbitrary goal of 1000 GRPs, they sought out persuadable voters across 100 different television channels. This allowed the campaign to capture new audiences not found using traditional methods. It’s a strategy that a campaign of any size can adopt if it’s concerned with reaching persuadable voters.