As we hit the home stretch in the Presidential election and other federal and statewide races, digital advertising spend continues to flourish.

But, candidates and their marketing teams may be fumbling on a key component of their playbook that could be the difference between first and second place: advertising to cookieless voters.

Google’s about-face (or flip flop) on deprecating cookies could lead advertisers — including political ones — to abandon their cookieless plans, but that would be shortsided as I explain below.

While the bulk of media attention is on the presidential election, there are also 468 Congressional races and a multitude of local elections. I would go as far as to say that a few politicians could sway their races by embracing cookieless, especially if their opponent neglects over half of the open web using Safari or Firefox browsers for example. There is an ocean of previously unreachable voters right in front of you, the billions of US consumers viewing content on cookieless browsers via mobile and desktop web.

It’s incredibly important to reach consumers where they consume content across mobile, desktop, or CTV. With emerging digital channels growing, those who do not advertise in cookieless environments may miss out on this campaign season’s biggest advantage.

Two Roads Ahead for the Candidates

Elections, at least in the United States, are often about choosing between two options. It’s either Republican or Democrat; left wing or right wing; yes or no on a proposition. Political candidates have some duality choices as well: whether to advertise only with third-party cookies, cookieless, or both. The good news is that candidates can — and should — advertise on both. But, like their for-profit corporate brethren, too few are embracing cookieless.

The polls make one thing abundantly clear: this will be a very close presidential election with multiple states currently within mere percentage points of each other. Even if the polls move in one direction or the other, there’s enough uncertainty that no one will know the winner until election night (and maybe thereafter).

The volume of ads seen in battleground states by the people who are legitimately swing votes are inundated with ads from both parties maligning their opponents and making conflicting claims. And while we historically think of TV ads as the bulk of political advertising, the money spent on digital continues to grow. Some estimates put it at 28% of all spent this cycle; 3x the figure from the last full election.

Valuable Audiences

Would Hillary Clinton have won the 2016 presidential election if she spent any time at all in Wisconsin? Flipping that state alone wouldn’t have procured enough electoral votes, but it was seen as emblematic of a campaign too confident in its superiority to a candidate to not do the simple work. She ended up losing the state by 23,000 votes as well as other important Midwest swing states like Michigan and Ohio. Today’s candidates need to assume nothing is certain and continue to reach every possible voter across the US.

Advertising allows candidates to  reach both cookieless and cookied users across all browsers.

Yes, Chrome dominates the browser market share with 52% in the US, 15% of those users have opted into cookieless settings, Safari has 32% and Firefox has 4% of audiences. There are plenty of registered and likely voters who may not watch much TV and are therefore only going to see political messages if those candidates advertise in cookieless environments.

Increased Attention Share

There’s a reason why both candidates prefer not to campaign in the same state at the same time. You don’t want to share the spotlight. Any candidate who embraces cookieless in a race where the competition doesn’t have a clear space to reach out to key audiences while the competitor is in the noisy cookied environment. Cookieless has a much lighter ad load overall, so every impression you serve has more impact.

It’s always interesting when someone living in an uncontested state travels to a swing state and suddenly sees the political ads they were missing.

Well, right now Internet users in swing states who are using cookieless browsers are just like those travelers. Campaigns that embrace cookieless can reach undecided voters in key regions on previously considered unreachable browsers.

Higher Performance

An underrated component of cookieless advertising is that ad load is generally faster in cookieless environments. Imagine paying good money to get in front of an undecided voter, only to waste that opportunity because the ad didn’t load before the user moved on. Finding the right audience is only one part of the equation; delivering your message clearly and completely is just as important. Cookieless achieves that.

Bigger Gains

Politicians love winning. Since there are far fewer bidders on ads in cookieless environments, win rates can be as high as 10X higher than bidding on third-party cookies. We also see engagement rates as high, if not higher, as in third-party cookie environments. This is crucial in the final weeks of the campaign when politicians have to spend before election day. Being in an environment with higher win rates alleviates stress that ads won’t run and allows the campaigns to focus on other pressing matters.

The Home Stretch

As with all campaign decisions, the best advertising strategies are built upon common sense. If you were driving to the polls, would you take the traffic-filled road or the wide open lane to get you to the polls before everyone else? Political campaigns often need everything to go right to win. Embracing cookieless this 2024 season could be the difference between getting elected versus giving a consolation speech.

The post This Campaign Season, Vote to Embrace Cookieless appeared first on AdMonsters.

 Facebook head of security Alex Stamos grabbed a lot of attention this weekend and maybe even riled up some oppressed developers when he demanded on Twitter that Adobe set an “end-of-life date for Flash and to ask the browsers to set killbits on the same date.” 

It is time for Adobe to announce the end-of-life date for Flash and to ask the browsers to set killbits on the same day.

— Alex Stamos (@alexstamos) July 12, 2015

He claimed the major reason developers are slow to upgrade to HTML5 is that they believe bug-prone, malware-carrying, ultimately insecure Flash will live forever. Not even Steve Jobs could kill it, so it must be… IMMORTAL. (Cue Queen theme to Highlander.)

However, a slew of announcements point to Flash lingering to oblivion on its own – sooner rather than later. The latest is Firefox’s June 13 decision to block the technology completely from its browser. This seems much more drastic than the Google Chrome Flash Pause (or the Chrome Plugin Power Saver), which has set the digital advertising community atwitter over the past few weeks. 

At the same time, Mozilla Support Chief Mark Schmidt admitted that Flash could be re-instated on Firefox as soon as Adobe “releases a version which isn’t being actively exploited by publicly known vulnerabilities.” Yes, it will be back… (Flash isn’t like the Terminator because not only is it old, it’s also obsolete.)

According to WT3 Tech, that Flash is only used by 10.6% of all websites. Designing websites in Flash went way out of fashion when Adobe cut mobile web support for the technology in 2011; responsive design powered by HTML5 has dominated site redesigns since. 

We all know it’s advertising that’s clutching to Flash for dear life, and the Chrome Pause puts a stop to all those animated times. Google DoubleClick account representatives sent emails to their clients late last week confirming that the Chrome Plugin Power Saver will be default on the popular browser as early as September 2015. With the second largest desktop browser share, it’s effectively a death sentence for Flash. 

Advertising has clung to Flash for numerous reasons. First, it’s a well-known tool with kits and libraries aplenty for developing content (namely creative) quickly. The same kind of support for HTML5 has been limited, but is quickly growing.

Beyond that, most programmatic platforms have strict file-size limits (the famous 40K) that Flash, the great condenser, can squeeze into. HTML5 files tend to be big because they contain a whole helluva lot of files. For example, loading videos in Flash is easier than HTML5 because different browsers prefer different formats and sizes; therefore, ad units need multiple video files. (Incidentally, some older browsers don’t support HTML5, so that actually requires including a fallback Flash file.)

As you can imagine, that bulks up HTML5 creatives considerably, but it seems to ridiculous to be stuck with 40K limits in the age of the petabyte (1,000 terabytes). With Flash going out of favor fast, expect programmatic platforms to up their capacity quick. The Google Display Network’s recommended initial maximum file size for display banners is 150K, but total load size taps out at 2.2 MB.

The Chrome Pause affects units smaller than 400 pixels wide or 300 pixels long; a conversion tool in DoubleClick Campaign Manager automatically converts non-rich-media Flash ads into HTML5 ad units. But flashy Flash units appear shaded gray with a “play” arrow on top. Hoo boy, I can’t wait to start pressing play on those ads… Said no web user ever. Incidentally, impressions are still being counted. 

Google’s advice: hop on the HTML5 train fast! And of course Google has services to help with that, including the Swiffy converter and Google Web Designer, both of which are free. But publishers should take this moment to examine a bigger creative opportunity. More on that here.

The post #OPSPOV: Flash in Freefall appeared first on AdMonsters.