You Ask, I Answer: Pausing Ads During the Election?

In today's episode, Leah asks, curious about your thoughts on when to pause any ad campaigns in the US uh across the board during the election. Hmm. I don't know that I would pause uh advertising campaigns during the election, unless your targeting is so like wildly broad that uh you're literally targeting anything and then everyone uh available. Certainly there are going to be some uh ad groups and and some people who will, you know, be more uh politically engaged during that time, and there'll be some ad networks that will be definitely swamped with political ads. But I would say that uh if you're targeting the entire ad adult population of the United States, uh you might want to re find your targeting first, because that's really broad and going to be really, really expensive.

What is true is that all advertisers really from uh now uh th through the election, um, should be monitoring their performance uh very carefully, looking for ads that underperform, looking for ads that are not getting uh enough impressions, looking for ads that are spending too much uh above your targets if you don't have a fixed target price uh on your advertising. All those things are things that I would be watching very carefully, and not just because of the election, but you know, to quote every email we've gotten in the last five months in these uncertain times, uh in this case is literally true. You have uncertainty all over the place. You have uh within the United States specifically, since we're talking about the election, uh, you have massive disparities in economic performance based on whether an individual state or region is open or closed, whether they're uh the pandemic is causing issues, whether there are uh political activities, uh rallies, uh you name it, there's a lot of uncertainty right now. And so i you may want to even go to the route of having uh different campaigns for different regions depending on what's going on in that region, right?

If you were uh advertising in, say New England and the Southwest, uh you might see the Southwest performance change be very different than New England's because they're in a very different stage of the pandemic. Uh I would say that uh you should consider advertising on platforms that have said no no political ads at all. Uh Twitter uh most prominently has said we're not taking any political ads and while there's there's certainly no shortage of uh uh legitimate and and illegitimate political activity on Twitter it's all organically based um so you'll want to uh consider running ads on that platform because you know you're not gonna be competing with the political campaigns with the understanding that you also want to be very careful about how you target no matter what platform you're running on you can bet that uh uh organizations and political action committees and all these things will be uh you know running their most uh extreme partisan ads uh possible uh from now until the election and depending on your brand and depending on on your audience. There are some ads that you may not want to have uh appearing near content about, you know, I don't know, aliens, uh, you know, reptilian aliens running Washington, DC. Um, which apparently is a real thing that some people believe.

You might not want your ads uh uh next to that. Just as much as a publisher may not want certain ads, an advertiser may not want certain publishers. So be very vigilant about where your ads appear, uh about which, for example, on Facebook, uh, which groups you might want to exclude, on Google ads, which websites you might want to exclude, uh, there are specific topics or the specific keywords. Uh you may not, for example, want your ads to run uh if the content uh or the the context uh contains either of the presidential candidates' names. You may just want to say nope, I'm gonna nope out of here and uh and and just let uh let our ads run somewhere else.

It's a good call to action to investigate your ad targeting anyway and refine it and improve it, clean it up, tune it. Uh these are all good things to do with your advertising. So I would say uh that's the approach I would take, rather than just going for a blanket pause. Again, depending on your organization too, you may or may not be uh want to advertise on certain uh ad networks because of uh the political or social implications of doing so. There are you know uh an any number of organizations said, for example, they will not advertise on Facebook until Facebook fixes its disinformation problem uh and its uh inability to filter out, you know, uh clearly fake information.

So if that is part and parcel of your company and its mission, you may uh you may have that be influencing where you advertise as well. But I wouldn't put a blanket pause on anything unless uh, you know, something like else horrendously tragic happens, in which case you may want to uh have that emergency stop button, as we all do for uh all kinds of situations uh that occur. Make sure that your social media policies and your advertising policies and procedures and processes within your organization are up to date so that you can hit pause if needed and have it be uh very rapid. But yeah. It's been an interesting year.

It's going to continue to be interesting times. Um be thoughtful and careful with your targeting. Be thoughtful and careful with your creative. Um the rule of thumb I would say in general is that if you have to ask, you know, is something appropriate, then chances are it's probably not. Um, whether it's an ad or organic content or what have you.

Uh and just be thoughtful, be asking yourself on a regular basis, how could this be misconstrued? Like if your ad uh shows up someplace that you didn't want to, how could this be misconstrued? Uh that's a a relatively safe question to ask yourself on a regular frequent basis. Good luck with your advertising, and uh and yeah, good luck. If you have follow up questions about this or any other question, please leave them in the comments box below.

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