Personalized political ads: The next frontier

09/09/2007

Cable TV viewers may soon be seeing candidates' pitches based on database analysis of family habits.


By Samantha Gross,
Associated Press
September 08, 2007


NEW YORK - Imagine: You turn on the TV and see a campaign ad. Your neighbor down the hall, watching the same channel at the same moment, sees a different ad selected for her in part because she's Hispanic, single, owns a dog and drinks Bud Light.

For years, politicians have been using massive databases that contain records of everything from what you drink to what you drive to decide which fliers to mail you and whether to send someone to knock on your door.

But with new technology that can send individualized ads to cable boxes, candidates will soon have an unprecedented ability to send their images into voters' living rooms while tweaking their voice, appearance and policy focus to match each viewer's predilections.

In short, voters' race, income, marital status and favorite brands could soon determine what they learn about political candidates while watching cable TV.

The technology, built to deliver what's known as "addressable advertising," is not yet widely available, but the nation's largest cable operators have made preparations to change that. The No. 1 provider, Comcast Corp., plans to have the service fully rolled out within two years, according to Hank Oster, senior vice president of the company's advertising sales division.

Once that happens, campaigns and other advertisers will be able to use their own databases to form a list of households they wish to target with a certain message. Comcast and other cable providers could match up such a list with their own customer rolls to get the right ads to the right homes.

The system is already in place on some TVs, but Comcast is unwilling to detail how extensive its trials are.

It's unclear whether the capability will impact political advertising during the 2008 election cycle, but if it catches on, politicians interested in speaking directly to voters will have a chance to get even more personal.

"In whatever medium we can, we want to talk to voters in as individualized a way as we can," says Mark Mellman, a Democratic pollster who worked on Democrat John Kerry's campaign in 2004. "People are particularly anxious to individualize TV ads in that way because they do tend to be more powerful."

In its simplest application, political strategists envision using the technology to tell an environmental activist about a candidate's position on global warming, while sending information about the candidate's health care plan to those without insurance.

But the technology could also allow candidates to make more-subtle adjustments to their mannerisms, speech patterns and appearance. In theory, a voter originally from the South could hear a candidate speak with a hint of a drawl. A dog owner could be shown the candidate's family portrait, including the pet. Cat owners would see something else.

Such manipulations are hardly new in politics, but the ability to bring such intensive targeting to television could give the candidates added leverage -- and raise new questions about their authenticity.