Against all odds
In 2010, Tom Miller was running for re-election as the Attorney General for the state of Iowa. A statewide race that had historically been weakly contested, Tom Miller was a target for his role in coordinating and helping lead the national state attorney general investigation into major banks filing of illegal paperwork, defrauding customers and foreclosing on homeowners. Tens of billions of dollars were at stake, giving banks a major incentive to defeat Tom Miller and support the election of a candidate far friendlier to the financial sector.
With such a great financial incentive to defeat the incumbent — not to mention national Republican candidates, conservative culture warriors and a motivated Tea Party — the odds were heavily stacked against Tom Miller. Or so it seemed.
Go where the people are
Every campaign needs to be on television, but Internet use as a citizen’s primary news source has skyrocketed, and candidates that do not utilize the medium effectively are losing a sizable percentage of the electorate.
In the 2010 Attorney General race, keyword advertising gave the Miller campaign an edge over the competition. IB5k took a number of messages — including those tested by traditional phone polling — and ran them within the same initial keyword advertising buy. Iowans for Miller had initially found certain issues polling extremely high, such as protecting children and taking a hard stand against crime. However, advertising analytics showed that “Vote to Protect Iowa’s Kids” generated less than half as much interest as a simple, effective message: “Vote for Tom Miller, Protecting Iowa Homes”.
Using this method of online message testing, IB5k was able to optimize advertising on other platforms (including Facebook, which has a far less complex analytics system) and take feedback to prioritize issues on the campaign website to highlight the real and effective work Tom Miller was doing.
The results
Only months before the election, the Iowans for Miller campaign had no discernible web presence while the top opponent was not only online, her site was the first result on Google when searching for “Tom Miller”. After consulting with IB5k, Tom Miller outperformed the top-of-the-ticket Democratic candidate by 27 points and defeated his politically experienced and extremely well-funded opponent, Brenna Findley, by 12 points.
