Mobile Marketer Ubimo Adds Politics As A Data Layer For Ad Targeting

Credit: From the Ubimo website

It’s that time of year again.

No, not the holidays. It’s the time when presidential politics gears up for its year-long season, and mobile marketing firm Ubimo is today announcing that it is adding US precinct-level election data to its targeting platform.

The Tel Aviv-based company, which focuses on the US market, said this is the first time such publicly available Presidential and Congressional election info has been married to local event, demographic and other data for targeting ads at mobile apps. Its other data layers include household income and ethnicity, as well as time-based info like weather and events.

CEO and co-founder Ran Ben-Yair told me that his company’s platform targets the user for the best time to show an ad, such as during a local concert that event and location data indicates the user is attending. Ubimo provides a demand-side platform for app advertisers, as well as a data management platform (DMP) for targeting.

He said that previous political data for such targeting has generally been behavioral, like assuming someone who visited a Republican website is a Republican.

While Ubimo claims uniqueness for the marriage of these political and other layers, there are a variety of antecedents. For instance, time-based “moments” that offer the best time to show an ad are becoming popular among a growing number of mobile marketers, including FollowAnalytics, MediaBrix and MobileFuse.

And the precinct-level political data, while characterizing a neighborhood of about 1,100 voters as Democratic- or Republican-leaning, is likely to be a broad brush compared to the groundbreaking political/demographic targeting reportedly pioneered by the Obama campaigns.

Although details are hard to come by, one expects that other political campaigns have now or will soon have similar capabilities to characterize the political inclinations of individual voters by their reading habits, their car purchase histories and similar indicators that add to the lean of their precinct.

Ben-Yair said several ad agencies for US political campaigns are using Ubimo’s platform, but he declined to mention them. He also said marketers could use this new layer if they had a product that they thought would appeal more to, say, users in a Democratic-leaning precinct.