Today, Targeted Victory is featured in both the print and online versions of this brief overview of how online ads are targeted to different voters. Our co-founder and current Romney for President Digitial Director Zac Moffatt is featured in the article as well.

Take a look at the article and let us know what you think.

Targeted Victory co-founder and current Romney for President Digital Director Zac Moffatt sat down with Fast Company recently and discussed the campaign’s use of social media and what their plans are going forward.

Zac also described the campaign’s embrace of emerging technologies such as the new mobile fundraising device Square as well as their use of Off The Grid targeting for online advertising.

Please click here to check out the full article.

Learn more about Mitt Romney’s use of Square in this post from The New York Times’ Bits Blog here and check out a screenshot of the app here in this Tech President post.

Tech President is reporting on Mitt Romney’s plan to deploy the brand new Square fundraising app this evening at his election night event in Florida. The Romney campaign passed along a screenshot to Tech President.

Click here to check out the write up and take a look at the app.

The New York Times Bits Blog reports that Mitt Romney will begin using the mobile fundraising tool Square at the campaign’s election night event in Tampa on Tuesday. Targeted Victory co-founder and current Romney for President Digital Director Zac Moffatt discussed the campaign’s plan to run a “beta test” with the new fundraising tool as well as his hopes expanding the use of Square as the campaign progresses.

Please click here to read the full article.

As a political digital company, we wanted to know the answer for our clients to help maximize their messaging and reach. We took data of a given time period for sends we conducted. We felt the millions of data points within the sample were enough to show a statistical difference.

We found that Thursday is the best day of the week to send mass email messages. This is followed by Tuesday, Sunday, Monday, Wednesday and Saturday. Friday is the worst day of the week to send email.

The chart above represents our findings with a normalized score for each day of the week showing how the days compare to each other. The best day of the week (Thursday) is scored a 10 while the worst day (Friday) is scored a 1. You shouldn’t read this chart as emails sent on Thursday are read 10 times more than emails on Friday. Rather, Thursday is the best, Friday is the worst and the other days are somewhere in between relative to each other by the score.

Below is a chart showing the breakdown by time of day with the same scoring method.

Emails sent between Noon and 3PM are most read and that trends down as the day progresses. Emails sent in the morning are not as effective.

The next level of analysis is to look how each time period contributes on any given day and vice-versa.

The above chart shows the same scores for email sends by day but is now overlayed with how those time periods contribute to those scores. As you can see that while Thursday is the best day to send, sending between Noon to 6 PM is even more effective. But sending Thursday after 6 PM is less effective than sending Tuesday between 6 PM and 9 PM.

The same overlay is done in reverse on the chart below. It displays how each day contributes to the score of a given time period.

The best way to read this is to say that if you have to send an email after 9 PM, Monday is the best day, followed Wednesday.

We realize that a lot of email marketing, especially for political clients, is time sensitive and there often isn’t room to decide when a message is getting out – if it’s in response to an attack, crowd building for an event or an endorsement announcement that could move the polls. But if you had the opportunity to send an email at a given time and day such as a weekly newsletter, this data can be useful in optimizing your email marketing campaign.

Targeted Victory co-founder and current Digital Director for Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, Zac Moffatt, was interviewed in The Atlantic yesterday. In the interview, Zac discussed his plans for taking the digital fight to the Obama reelection machine and digital strategy in general.

Click here to read the full article.

As GOP presidential contenders stump for votes from Iowa to New Hampshire to South Carolina, Google, Facebook and Twitter are in a race of their own — for millions of dollars in political ads.

The tech giants are offering candidates new ways to advertise — Mitt Romney has spots on YouTube and Rick Perry’s Facebook ads target Christian college kids in South Carolina — and hiring political consultants, sponsoring debates and poaching from each other’s ad sales teams to jockey for the top spot in political social media circles.

“This is the Twitter election,” boasted Peter Greenberger, who Twitter recently lured away from Google, where he started the search giant’s political ad sales team in 2007. “We’ll be a core component.”

Not so fast, says Google, the most experienced Web company when it comes to political advertising. Google has expanded its team to work directly with campaigns to come up with ad strategies and every Republican presidential candidate has already bought in, and several have also bought newly refined YouTube ads that target viewers in specific states or cities.

“What we saw in Iowa and New Hampshire was campaigns using search ads to recruit volunteers and get out the vote,” said Rob Saliterman, who heads Google’s political ad sales on the Republican side. “They’re reaching people at the exact moment where someone has expressed interest in the campaign.”

In 2008 and 2010, candidates largely used Google ads to fundraise. Now, in a sign of new sophistication, candidates are using the ads to persuade voters. For example, they’ve begun to run search ads on each other’s names. In Iowa, a Google search for Rick Santorum would bring up a critical ad paid for by Perry’s campaign. When New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie endorsed Romney, his campaign bought ads to pop up when voters searched for Christie.

Google also owns YouTube, the Web’s biggest online video network, where candidates frequently post short ad spots and commercials. New for this election, YouTube offers a “TrueView” feature that tracks how long viewers watch a video ad, so campaigns only pay when a viewer watches most of the ad.

Then there’s Facebook, which also has practice when it comes to working with politicians, though its user base was smaller for previous elections. The social networking behemoth allows campaigns to target voters of a specific demographic with specific interests because users volunteer their personal information.

In Iowa, for example, Perry’s campaign marketed his faith-focused commercials to Iowans who identified themselves as Christians on Facebook. The campaign also made sure a spot featuring his wife, Anita Perry, was prominent on the pages of conservative women in the state.

Last week, Perry’s campaign launched a new ad targeting students at Furman University, a Baptist college in South Carolina, according to Vincent Harris of Harris Media, who manages Perry’s digital strategy.

Twitter, already central to the national political conversation, is a newcomer to the political ad arena. In September, it launched its first political product aiming to get a cut of the lucrative 2012 ad spend.

A candidate can buy a “promoted tweet,” which will appear when a certain term is searched for as well as in the timelines of campaign followers, and have a small logo and disclaimer. Twitter also offers a “promoted account” to help boost the number of followers and a “promoted trend,” which will put a campaign ad atop popular lists of trending topics.

The tech contest to be the wired candidate’s answer to the TV buy has caught the attention of campaign strategists.

“They’re each trying to have the value add of being the fastest-moving vertical,” said Zac Moffatt, digital strategist for the Romney campaign.

“When I started doing this three years ago, Google had two people, Facebook had no one and Twitter didn’t have advertising at all. Now I’m watching them all expand.”

Television ads will continue to attract the bulk of campaign advertising spending in 2012, strategists say. But they predict social media will play a larger role this year — in both national and state contests — because growing numbers of voters are getting their news online rather than from TV. In the 2010 elections, 73 percent of adult Internet users went online to get information about the elections or to get involved in a campaign, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

While it’s not the first election cycle in which campaigns have tried to engage voters online, “it will be a seismic shift in terms of the amount of budgets these mediums are getting,” said Josh Koster, Managing Partner of Chong + Koster, a digital media firm. Google and Facebook will probably get larger pieces of the budget pie, he said, since Twitter has a more limited number of ad products.

To capitalize on their growing political roles, the companies are also trying to increase their visibility on the campaign trail. Google and Facebook have already sponsored GOP debates, and Google is sponsoring media hangouts at the primary caucuses.

Not everyone thinks Google, Facebook and Twitter need to compete to attract campaigns.

“They all have large audiences, so it’s in the best interest of the campaigns to be on all the platforms,” said Alan Rosenblatt, associate director of online advocacy for the Center for American Progress, a progressive think tank. “Is there a competition between ABC and NBC to get political ads? I don’t think so. They’re all going to get political ads.”

That’s not stopping the companies from hiring top digital and political strategists to drive their efforts.

Saliterman, who held several communications jobs in the George W. Bush administration, joined Google in September to leverage his contacts with Republicans. Andrew Roos, former Democratic campaign manager, handles sales to Democrats, and a new hire, Sean Harrison, is in charge of selling ads to super PACs and independent-expenditure groups.

To get ready for 2012, Facebook hired Katie Harbath, former chief digital strategist for the National Republican Senatorial Committee who also worked on Rudy Giuliani’s presidential campaign and the Republican National Committee, to reach out to Republican candidates. Adam Conner, a longtime Facebook staffer in D.C., handles relationships with Democrats.

In addition to Greenberger, Twitter hired Mindy Finn, one of the Republican Party’s top digital strategists and founder of consulting firm EngageDC.

One of Twitter’s big advantages: Its users are ultra-engaged in politics.

That’s already paying dividends for campaigns. For corporate advertisers, between 1 percent and 3 percent of Twitter users will engage with a Promoted Tweet by clicking, retweeting, replying to or marking it as a favorite. But with political Promoted Tweets, that number is as high as 20 percent, Greenberger said.

Another advantage: Twitter allows campaigns to immediately push a message to followers during a debate, after a TV interview or to respond to a rival’s attack.

Facebook’s huge user base tends to stay on the site for long periods of time, creating a captive audience for political messaging with a social bent.

For example, Newt Gingrich’s campaign has created an application that shows which of a user’s friends are making phone calls for the candidate.

Santorum posts video clips to his page, counting on his “fans” to share them with their own friends. Supporters of Ron Paul often share his status updates and messages.

“What’s really different this cycle is that we’re seeing campaigns start to add a social element into everything they do,” Facebook’s Harbath said.

That’s a departure from previous cycles, when more emphasis was placed on how many people clicked the “Like” button on a candidate’s page.

Social media companies aren’t the only Web platforms campaigns are leveraging this year. Internet radio site Pandora is also getting some advertising dollars, as are popular video sites such as Hulu.com and search engines like Microsoft’s Bing.

But the biggest slice of the online ad budget is going to the “Big Three,” as several strategists have dubbed Google, Facebook and Twitter.

Some presidential campaigns will be spending upward of 10 percent of their advertising budgets on digital ad buys — a significant increase from previous election cycles, predicted Eric Frenchman of Campaign Solutions, who managed Michele Bachmann’s digital efforts before she dropped out of the race.

Particularly in the early primary states, “TV media has probably been bought up, so you can have a much more significant impact if you go mostly digital at this point,” Frenchman said.

Romney, for example, bought up a significant amount of ads on YouTube videos heading into Iowa and New Hampshire, and is doing the same for South Carolina.

Despite the competitive pitches, there is one area where Google, Facebook and Twitter agree: Campaigns should be investing a lot more money online.

“Voters are spending a lot more time online and the ad dollars are not matching that,” Greenberger said. He said he expects the average congressional campaigns to spend only about 5 percent of their advertising budgets on digital media. Presidential campaigns may spend closer to 10 percent.

Campaigns are already showing signs of becoming bigger spenders in the online space. Harris, Perry’s digital adviser, said he’s recommending that campaigns spend at least one-third of their ad buys on Facebook alone. Moffatt, of Romney’s campaign, expects the campaign to spend “no less than 10 percent” on online plays.

“It’s so much more competitive this time around” between the social media sites, said Michael Beach, co-founder of Targeted Victory, a Republican digital strategy consulting firm. “Next fall, there’s going to be a lot of money going into everything. Right now, when resources are more scarce, they’re all competing for the first dollar.”

Click here for the press release.

With a record amount of political advertising dollars expected to flow into the marketplace next year, online media outlets are ramping up efforts to grab a share, including digital-music service Pandora Media Inc.

Pandora will unveil Friday a new targeted ad product aimed at political candidates and special interest groups. Using ZIP Code data gathered when consumers sign up for an account, Pandora can target ads to a defined geographic area such as a congressional district.

“We are starting to speak the same language as campaign strategists,” says Pandora’s chief revenue officer John Trimble.

Political ad executives say the targeted capability could make political ads more efficient. “Going deeper on targeting helps eliminate waste,” says Michael Beach, a partner at Targeted Victory, a Republican digital-ad firm that works on campaigns including Mitt Romney’s presidential bid. “Instead of buying the Cincinnati, Ohio, media market, I can buy just the congressional district” that a campaign wants to sway, adds Mr. Beach.

Twitter also has rolled out new products to woo dollars from the Washington crowd. Twitter began accepting political ads in September, offering its “Promoted Tweets” that use a purple icon and also reveals the ad’s backer, which is viewable when a user’s mouse rolls over the ad.

Political ads are likely to be one of the few bright spots next year in ad spending. Political ad outlays could reach $4 billion next year, estimates WPP PLC’s Kantar Media, compared with the last presidential election year of 2008 when spending topped $2.6 billion.

To be sure, online outlets face plenty of competition. “I would be shocked if online political ad spending got 5%” of the dollars, says Ken Goldstein, president of the division of Kantar that tracks political spending. It estimates local TV will pull in roughly $3.3 billion of the total spending.

“Politics is an emotional game and TV is an emotional media, that is why it is the preferred battle ground,” says Kyle Roberts, president of Smart Media Group, a media buying firm in Alexandria, Va.

Finding new sources of ad revenue is key for Pandora, an 11-year-old company that has yet to turn a profit. Its stock has slid 23% since the company went public in June.

Pandora, which customizes songs according to the listener preference for genres and styles, faces growing competition from services like Spotify and traditional radio broadcasters’ online offerings.

Pandora offers advertisers display, audio and video ads that run on its site and on its mobile application. The new targeted ad product is in addition to previously available targeting data that the company already provides marketers, such as age, gender and ZIP Code. The company, which began selling political ads in 2008, says it has an edge over other media outlets because it runs only one audio ad per break while it says other outlets are cluttered with political ads.

Peter Greenberger, the head of Twitter’s political ad sales and former political ad guru for Google, says having consumer engage with ads is something that traditional media can’t really offer up. One third of Twitter’s political promotional tweets get clicked or retweeted, Mr. Greenberg says. “When is the last time you took a screen shot of a TV or a banner ad and sent it to friends?” he adds.

Original article can be found here.

While Rick Perry’s performance caused him to lead in the absolute number of tweets, those tweets about Mitt Romney reached a wider audience. Whether these tweets were about Romney alone or other candidates in relation to Mitt Romney, he is driving wide-reaching conversation.

The Overall Perspective: http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/4391152/Untitled

This word cloud represents all tracked tweets during the period between 8 PM on debate night to 7:30 AM on Thursday, filtering out the candidates’ identifiers, the debate hashtags, and expletives. Though this debate was a primary debate, the twittersphere is looking forward to the general election, as demonstrated by the prominence of Obama in the tracked tweets. The #tcot hashtag still continues to drive debate amongst the conservative members of Twitter and still maintains its resonance. The twittersphere also is concerned about the possibility of a European meltdown, as both Italy and Europe make prominent appearances in the word cloud.

The prominence of Europe and Italy provides a nice segue into the next debate, as the candidates will return to their podiums on November 22nd to articulate their visions for American foreign policy and national security. The public has discussed and deliberated over these topics already. On Tuesday, it will look for the candidates to do so.

Misc: Word Clouds for Each Candidate