Campaigns Use ‘Microtargeting’ to Attract Supporters

In recent primaries, two kinds of Republican voters have been seeing two different Mitt Romney video ads pop up on local and national news Web sites. The first, called “It’s Time to Return American Optimism,” showed the candidate on the campaign trail explaining how this was an election “to save the soul of America.” It was aimed at committed party members to encourage a large turnout. The second video ad, geared toward voters who have not yet aligned themselves with a candidate, focused more on Mr. Romney as a family man. Versions of the two ads were seen online in Florida, Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina.

Kenneth M. Goldstein, the president of the Campaign and Media Analysis Group at Kantar Media, part of the advertising giant WPP, said Mr. Romney’s directed ads represented a sea change in political advertising.

“Forty years ago, you’d watch the same evening news ad as your Democratic neighbor,” Mr. Goldstein said.

The technology that makes such customized advertising possible is called microtargeting, which is similar to the techniques nonpolitical advertisers use to serve up, for example, hotel ads online to people who had shopped for vacations recently.

In the last few years, companies that collect data on how consumers behave both online and off and what charitable donations they make have combined that vast store of information with voter registration records.

As a result, microtargeting allows campaigns to put specific messages in front of specific voters — something that has increased in sophistication with the large buckets of data available to political consultants.

Zac Moffatt, the digital director for Mr. Romney’s campaign, worked with a company called Targeted Victory for the online ads. “Two people in the same house could get different messages,” Mr. Moffatt said. “Not only will the message change, the type of content will change.”

Few campaigns like to talk about this kind of advertising. Representatives from the Obama campaign and the Gingrich campaign would not confirm whether they were using targeted ads tied to voter data. Saul Anuzis, chairman of the Republican National Committee on Technology, said he expected spending on digital political ads to reach 10 to 15 percent of campaign budgets in the 2012 election season.

Those numbers pale beside what campaigns will spend on television or direct mail. But the chief benefit of microtargeting is that campaigns can spend their money more efficiently by finding a particular audience and paying $5 to $9 per thousand displays of an ad, Mr. Anuzis said.

“We can now literally target the household,” Mr. Anuzis said.

Microtargeting is largely done by a handful of campaign consultant groups including Aristotle, CampaignGrid and Targeted Victory, which collect some of their data from direct marketing companies like Acxiom and Experian. The companies are reluctant to discuss which candidates are their clients, but according to a Federal Election Commission filing, CampaignGrid does work with the Ron Paul “super PAC,” Endorse Liberty.

The process for targeting a user with political messages takes three steps. The first two are common to any online marketing: a “cookie,” or digital marker, is dropped on a user’s computer after the user visits a Web site or makes a purchase, and that profile is matched with offline data like what charities a person supports, what type of credit card a person has and what type of car he or she drives. The political consultants then take a third step and match that data with voting records, including party registration and how often the person has voted in past election cycles, but not whom that person voted for.

Throughout the process, the targeted consumers are tagged with an alphanumeric code, removing their names and making the data anonymous. So while the campaigns are not aiming at consumers by name — only by the code — the effect is the same. Campaigns are able to aim at specific possible voters across the Web. Instead of buying an ad on, say, The Miami Herald Web site, a campaign can buy an audience.

Another advantage is that these ads can be bought quickly — using an auction process to obtain ad space — when campaigns need to move rapidly to aim at an audience, for example, to counter a bad debate performance or an unflattering newspaper article.

“If you can get in front of a news story, if you can help frame the debate rather than respond to the debate,” Mr. Anuzis said, “that makes a big difference.”

John Simpson, media director at Blue State Digital, which worked with the Obama campaign in 2008, said bidding technology means strategists can “get a campaign up and running very fast and also potentially pull it down very fast.”

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‘Super PAC’ Role Grows for Republican Campaigns

Mitt Romney’s campaign spent $19 million during January, almost three times as much as the $6.5 million he raised. He ultimately won two states, New Hampshire and Florida, ending the month with less than $8 million in cash on hand. Newt Gingrich raised nearly as much, $5.6 million, and spent close to $6 million. Rick Santorum, who enjoyed a surge of grass-roots donations after being declared the victor in Iowa, raised $4.5 million, as did Representative Ron Paul of Texas — amounts that still leave Mr. Romney in the lead but no longer in a class by himself when it comes to raising money.

The super PAC backing Mr. Romney, Restore Our Future, raised $6.6 million in January and spent close to $14 million, much of it on advertisements battering Mr. Gingrich in Iowa and Florida. A super PAC backing Mr. Gingrich raised much more that month — almost $11 million — and spent most of it on attack advertisements against Mr. Romney in South Carolina, where Mr. Gingrich ultimately won, and in Florida, where Mr. Romney prevailed.

The spending reports revealed the breadth and power of super PACs as the campaign hits a critical and perhaps decisive period, with outside groups poised to pick up a growing share of political spending during the costly primary battle that lies ahead.

Bolstered by Mr. Romney’s extraordinarily high burn rate, the campaigns spent about $5 million more during January than the super PACs supporting them. But over all, super PACs backing the four leading Republican contenders raised $22.1 million in January, slightly more than the candidates themselves, and ended the month with $19.4 million in cash on hand, about $5 million more than the candidates had.

Most of that money came in six- and seven-figure checks from just a few dozen individuals and corporations — the billionaire casino executive Sheldon Adelson, the mutual fund investor Foster S. Friess, and the Texas industrialist Harold C. Simmons, among others — who have exploited recent court rulings and regulatory shifts to exert unprecedented influence over their party’s choice of presidential nominee.

Restore Our Future, the super PAC backing Mr. Romney, entered February with $16.3 million in cash on hand, money that has already underwritten an early run of attack advertisements against Mr. Santorum, whose victories in Colorado, Minnesota and Missouri this month have made him the chief target for Mr. Romney’s attacks.

Mr. Romney could be even more dependent on Restore Our Future money than he was last month: while he has raised far more than other Republican candidates, he has spent heavily without taking a clear lead in the race. Moreover, Mr. Romney is “maxing out” the donors to his campaign — taking the maximum $2,500 contribution allowed by federal law for the primary — faster than any of the leading candidates of either party during the last two races, according to analysis by The New York Times.

Through the end of December, Mr. Romney had raised $2,500 from more than 14,000 donors, representing about 44 percent of all of his contributors. About 5 percent of Mr. Paul’s donors, 14 percent of Mr. Gingrich’s donors, and 30 percent of Mr. Santorum’s donors had maxed out, meaning that the vast majority of their contributors can continue to give more money — in most cases significantly more — this year.

As his campaign prepares for a potentially long fight for the nomination, Mr. Romney has stepped up his fund-raising events in strongholds like Washington and New York and begun prospecting elsewhere for supporters. During a campaign visit to Cincinnati on Monday, Mr. Romney made time for an evening stop at the Great American Tower, where local donors said they would raise more than $600,000 for him.

“We are very pleased with the continued support we have received from Americans across the country who want to see real change in Washington,” Spencer Zwick, Mr. Romney’s national finance chairman, said in a statement. “We have exceeded our fund-raising goals and are on track with spending plans. We are the only campaign who has the organization and resources to go the distance of a long primary process.”

Though other candidates appear to have more robust grassroots fund-raising networks than Mr. Romney, they also ended January with far less money in the bank. Mr. Gingrich had about $1.8 million — and nearly as much debt. Mr. Santorum ended January with less than $1.5 million on hand, though his campaign said he raised at least $3 million in grass-roots contributions after his triple victories this month. Mr. Paul had about $1.6 million.

Griff Palmer and Jeff Zeleny contributed reporting.

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