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On November 3, 2009, Chris Christie became the first Republican Governor of NJ in 12 years. A key to his election was a state of the art new media and advertising campaign engineered by CampaignGrid, a Fort Washington, PA based company. Grid runs the only online advertising platform in the United States dedicated to serving Candidates and Causes and since 2008 has worked on over 30 national races in which 87% of its clients have won their elections.
Background
Corzine, the incumbent NJ Governor, had a budget more than 3.5 times larger than Christie. This forced the campaign to be innovative and use online smartly to target messages and respond to the massive negative television advertising campaign that Corzine relied on to get re-elected. Making the environment even more difficult for the challenger was the fact that there are 700,000 more registered Democrats than Republicans in NJ, coupled with NJ’s geography. Sandwiched between the New York and Philadelphia television markets, TV advertising is expensive, and more than half of the people watching the TV ads could not vote for Christie because they live in Pennsylvania or New York.
Online presented an opportunity to eliminate advertising waste and deliver a wide variety of messages including pre-roll, click to play, and in-stream video ads using Grid’s advertising platform. The goal at the beginning of the campaign was to raise awareness and build lists of supporters that could be mobilized for the get out and vote effort. By the week before the election, Grid had built an army of more than 100,000 people online for Get Out The Vote in three distinct categories: 1) The Republican Base, 2) Democrats who were disenfranchised with the Governor, and 3) Independents who make up the majority of the electorate in NJ.
To do this Grid ran close to 150 million targeted impressions to NJ voters. List building was done via email signups, on Twitter and Facebook, and by dropping re-marketing cookies to self identified supporters of the campaign who visited the campaign website. These cookies allowed Grid to find voters on thousands of sites the week before the election, and advertise to them for get out and vote, based on the issues they are interested in. The Campaign called this “Political Lojack.”, Grid calls this common sense. Advertising was placed on top sites such as Google, You Tube, Yahoo and Facebook, local New Jersey news sites, and thousands of long tail sites where NJ residents were reading about news, politics or spending time online surfing. 
“”Campaigns must spend their limited dollars wisely in today’s ever-changing paid media marketplace. Campaign Grid helped us spend our resources in an economical and highly-targeted way, helping us defeat a much better-funded incumbent governor,” says Mike Duhaime, Chris Christie’s chief adviser.
Results
Despite being outspent online, the Christie campaign was able to win online. Seen in this chart, Christie’s site visits increased consistently from July through election day, as the online advertising campaign was executed. While spending less, Grid was able to exceed Corzine’s traffic and make it grow consistently until election day.
Christiefornj.com versus joncorzine09.com
Audience Targeting using issues and geography:
Online allowed the Christie campaign to find and communicate with different audiences interested in issues important to NJ residents, such as property tax reduction, fighting corruption, mammograms, balancing the state budget, and preventing toll increases on the NJ turnpike and parkway. Once identified, just like direct mail, Grid’s technology can segment these lists in an automated fashion, and advertise to them across the web.
Real Time Polling
Issues targeting provides real time poling. While exit poling confirmed which issues were most important to NJ voters as seen in the NJN Monmonth University Exit Poll, the importance of interactive new media, is that via CampaignGrid’s analytics, the Campaign already knew the way voters were searching and click on banner ads.
How it Works & Examples:
Below are some examples of web targeting such as geographic, contextual, behavioral, social network targeting, and online remarketing. Along with the many new technologies and targeting tools, the campaign also used paid search extremely effectively. Search continues to be an important way to gauge real time public opinion by analyzing what residents of NJ search for and what messages they click on.
Geo-Targeting:
Using Geo-targeting, Grid only displayed ads to NJ residents to their homes and where they worked. Based on which part of the state they lived in, they were presented with the issues most important to their locale. For example, residents who lived or worked near the NJ Parkway and were incensed when the Governor proposed to raise tolls, were targeted with ads specific to this issue.
Growing use of Online Video to combat the high cost and waste of Television
Christie was the first campaign in the nation to use Google tv ads and in-stream video ads within television shows broadcast online. It distributed rapid response video messages on hundreds of sites. The Grid platform is on the leading edge of using video; creating inexpensive web ads posted on You Tube and distributed smartly using click to play video ads on hundreds of websites across the internet.
Rapid Response using online video
While the primary issues in this campaign were related to the economy, job loss, and high property taxes, the health care debate was also part of this campaign. The Corzine administration made mammogram testing an issue, by accusing Christie of not supporting this, and using their incumbent pulpit and massive ad budget to convince the women of NJ this was a true belief of Mr. Christie. The growth in Google searches confirmed that this was becoming a real issue for women voters, and based on this data, the campaign mounted an interactive response. They created a web and TV commercial, a banner campaign, and Grid used its targeting platform to find women and display the video ad.
Another example of rapid response to media articles can be seen below. Contextual targeting identified the news story and delivered a banner ad on fighting corruption.
List building Banners:
To sign people up to join the campaign, Grid employed a first of its kind, social media engagement banner, that allows viewers to sign up in the banner ads to follow the campaign on twitter, become a fan on facebook, or sign up for the email newsletters. This tool has provided a 200 percent lift on response versus static banners, and was responsible for signing up thousands of supporters.
Sign up email, Fan on Facebook and Follow on Twitter in the bannerpercent lift in response rates to traditional banners.
Click on this link to see a demo of these Social Media Engagement Banners.
During the 2010 cycle, we expect that many campaigns will use these techniques to replace what used to be done via phone banks and walks, and now will be done using display and video ads on hundreds of websites to prior site visitors.
To learn more about CampaignGrid and its sister company, WorldBenefactor, a leader in venture philanthropy and online advertising for non profits, click on our links, or call (215) 283 1005 and ask for Jeff Dittus or Rich Masterson.
