Campaign Trail Leads to the Web

They figured out how to get New Mexico residents to vote for George W. Bush in 2004. Now, some of the nation’s top political strategists are creating an online-advertising company, hoping to apply to the Web what they know about aiming messages on the campaign trail.


Harold Ickes, left, former deputy chief of staff to President Bill Clinton, is an investor in Resonate Networks.
The company, Resonate Networks, was co-founded by Sara Taylor, the White House political director under Mr. Bush. Its investors include Harold Ickes, the former deputy chief of staff to President Bill Clinton, who runs the database that Democratic strategists rely on; Steve McMahon, the prominent Howard Dean consultant; and Alex Gage, who advised Karl Rove on Mr. Bush’s re-election in 2004.

Resonate is an ad network, which that means it signs up advertisers, along with publishers like Frommers.com and BobVila .com, and matches advertisements with specific sites, taking a cut of what publishers charge the advertisers. More than 300 ad networks have similar models, though all have different recipes.

Resonate differs in its political targeting. This is a strategy that has been used by politicians for years. In 2004, for instance, Mr. Gage’s analysis found a group of New Mexico mothers, Hispanic and lower- to middle-class, who largely voted for Democrats. But the data suggested that they were supportive of Mr. Bush’s No Child Left Behind public school legislation. The campaign sent those women messages about Mr. Bush’s policies on education. In part because of tactics like that, Mr. Bush won New Mexico.

Resonate is trying to do the same thing online for both political issues and corporate ones. It researches sites the way a campaign adviser would research a battleground state, finding which sites have visitors who would be receptive to a certain message.

“We can target an audience that supports a particular issue,” said Bryan Gernert, the chief executive of the company. Because the company can identify the makeup of a site —the percentage of site visitors who support, oppose or have mixed views on a certain issue — it can choose sites that, say, gay marriage opponents do not really visit for a strong advertisement supporting gay marriage.

“You can have a pretty aggressive message that won’t inflame your opposition, but you’ll still mobilize your support base,” Mr. Gernert said. “We can also identify the middle, the persuadable, where you can do an education campaign and move them toward your position on an issue.” That leads to interesting pairings: for a group promoting domestic drilling, Resonate found the most sympathetic visitors were not on a conservative site, but on Egreetings.com.

Resonate gathers about 4,000 survey takers every quarter, and asks them questions about their opinions on issues like gun control or unions, along with questions about their habits and their involvement level in political issues.

Resonate adds information about each panelist from other sources, including voting and campaign contribution history and demographic information, collecting about 1,100 pieces of data per panelist. It then tracks which sites the panelists visit on the Web for four months — the panelists allow Resonate to track their movements, some receiving a small fee in return. With the information about which of their panelists are visiting which sites, Resonate compiles profiles of each site’s visitors.

Advertisers have a range of ways to direct their messages online. They can aim based on someone’s registration information on a site, or by time of day, or by what type of site the ads will appear on or what sites that visitor has looked at recently.

But, advertisers said, this was the first company they were aware of that added visitors’ probable political behavior.

“If you look at the typical microtargeting approach, you have to be a very large national campaign to really afford it,” said Tim Ryan, the general manager of Sawyer Miller Advertising, which has handled public affairs campaigns for Microsoft. “For the public affairs context, I think we’re excited about this, and excited about the ability to better target our audiences at a lower cost point, and get better engagement, and that’s the goal,” he said.

Resonate executives said that they thought the company would be attractive for corporate social responsibility campaigns, or for companies’ advertisements that reflected an issue, like a fast-food company that wanted to advertise a healthy snack to moms worried about obesity

Resonate, which has been operating since the fall, does not have any corporate clients yet; its formation is scheduled to be announced Thursday. Executives said it had sales of about $1 million in its first months, to public affairs groups.

Mr. Ickes, the president of Catalist, which sells national voter data to Democratic and progressive organizations, said he invested in the company because having an Internet version of what he did seemed logical.

“People who are selling things or want to promote something, whether it’s a candidate or a product, are always looking for ways to figure out what audience to target,” he said.