A new online ad network has debuted whose founders claim it can reach people with strong beliefs about certain political issues—someone who is against drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge but supports offshore drilling generally, for example—and find them on unconventional sites.
However, the targeting comes at a price–$12 to $15 per thousand impressions.
Dubbed Resonate Networks, the venture is claimed to be non-partisan and initially aimed to draw non-profits, political campaigns and corporate advertisers. It was launched by former Republican and Democratic political strategists including Harold Ickes, Bill Clinton’s former deputy chief of staff.
According to Bryan Gernert, CEO of Alexandria, VA-based Resonate, the hefty CPMs are worth it. He claims click-to-conversion rates—signing a petition, making a donation or sending a letter to Congress, for example—for campaigns on Resonate Networks so far have been from 20% to 50%.
“I think getting conversion rates from a typical network on those types of issues would be very difficult,” he said. “And we can support either side of an issue.”
He added: “We can target by people’s issues and beliefs versus demo data. For example, if you’re looking for people interested in environmental issues, you can target some basic Web sites, but what we’ve found is that those people spend time in some unusual places. There’s a large audience on certain Web sites that don’t have anything to do with the content.”
For example, last month Resonate ran a campaign for a labor issue. Two of the sites that scored very highly in its profiling were travel Web site Frommer’s and do-it-yourself Web site BobVila.com. The campaign ran on 40 sites. Frommer’s was the third-best performer and BobVila.com outperformed political-issue sites by 65%, Gernert said.
He added one reason for such high conversions on non-issue sites is that issue-oriented ads stand out on them.
“Because you’re not seeing another ad for a rental car company on the travel site, it gets people’s attention and they take action,” he said.
Gernert also claimed that Resonate can find people on sites where there are many supporters for a certain position and little to no opposition, so campaigners can get aggressive without inciting their opponents. “Reaching the opposition doesn’t do anything positive,” he said. “If anything, it can produce backlash.”
He added: “The other thing we can do is find sites where there is a disproportionate number of undecideds so if you want to do more of an educational campaign to move that group one way or the other, we can run the campaign on Web sites that have that audience.”
He said the company has taken survey data and Web surfing behavior from one of the big online surveying firms—either comScore, Nielsen or Harris, he wouldn’t say which—and has used some internal algorithms to find activists and where they visit online.
However, Gernert stresses that his firm is getting no personally identifiable information from its survey- and Internet-behavioral-data provider.
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