• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, February 6, 2024

TargetSmart, which provides political data, will integrate with Comscore media and measurement data and consumption to support targeting options for democratic and progressive campaigns and causes during the 2024 elections.

“From the voter file, you can determine, voting history and patterns and those kinds of things,” says Hamid Qayyum, head of marketing and media at The Tara Group, the parent company of operating group TargetSmart. He explained how Comscore data, which measures global media, will assist to determine how and where to place ads.

Advertising dollars spent on U.S. elections and advocacy issues in 2024 are estimated to grow 31.2% to $16 billion, compared with the last presidential election in 2020.

The integration is focused on an understanding of how voters use media and how marketers will plan media buying.

The partnership between the two companies began in 2020, but this is the first time the two will support 2024 candidates, causes, and nonprofits to reach target audiences. TargetSmart’s clients can now leverage Comscore’s local and national cross-platform viewership data from digital, television and connected television (CTV). 

Qayyum explained how TargetSmart, which focuses its data sets on democratic and progressive politics, built a media buying platform, and then expanded its partnership with Comscore as part of the next step to broaden its services.  

Democrats don’t want their data to be used for Republicans and vice versa, Qayyum said, so TargetSmart chooses to support the “blue and progressive side.” And while Comscore does not strictly “sell to the left or the right,” said David Algranati, chief innovation officer at Comscore, this first joint offering will remain available only to TargetSmart clients.

For example, a democratic candidate running for senator in Ohio would come to TargetSmart for data. The candidate’s teams would create custom audience segments such as “labor voters” for a specific county.

The segment might focus on “reproductive rights” or “labor.” That file is then routed to Comscore to better understand the segment’s media behavior to focus the messages, along with the best places for the ad to reach the voters.

Data from TargetSmart provides voter data details. The campaign decides how to use that information to determine target audiences. Comscore identifies the media and how much the target audience consumes. The costs and the data would determine media purchases.