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The Politics of Your Pandora Station
If you've watched a popular primetime television show recently, you've likely started to see more political ads during the breaks. Same for Pandora listeners. For Pandora, as with local television stations, this year's spike in political ads is a welcome source of cash for a media company reliant on advertising revenue. During the first three months of 2012, Pandora brought in $70 million in advertising revenue, nearly double its total over the same three months in 2011, a nonelection year, according to SEC filings. For political campaigns, the feeling is mutual. Schlough, a Democratic digital media consultant. "That's part of what makes Pandora unique."
Unlike most Internet display ads, Pandora's ads make impressions upon users who, even if only listening passively, cannot avoid an ad simply by looking away. Pandora also has more than 150 million registered users and in many places is the most listenedto radio station. But perhaps the biggest reason Pandora attracts political types is targeting political campaigns can customize which listeners hear what ads based on where they live, how old they are, and even what type of music they listen to. area, or young people in Ohio, we can do that,www.officenetzwerk.de/page/e107_plugins/forum/forum_viewtopic.php?590.last," says Francisca Fanucchi, a spokeswoman for Pandora. When users sign up for Pandora, they give their ZIP code,www.pimpblog.nl/irelandcheappandoracharmssale/143380/Free+Next+Day+In-Store+Delivery+around+on+sofas.html, gender, date of birth, and Email address,www.3xf.se/e107_plugins/forum/forum_viewtopic.php?30.last, all of which are used for targeting purposes,divine-gamers.co.uk/e107_plugins/forum/forum_viewtopic.php?21240.last, Fanucchi says.
This customization makes Pandora ideal for microtargeting, a strategy used by political groups to identify very specific types of potential voterslike "liberal leaning postgraduate singles" or "middleaged commuters near Philadelphia"by mining large amounts of data such as credit card records and Internet histories.
Chad Kolton,au-rum.ru/node/84850, a spokesman for Republican datatracking firm Data Trust, says companies match commercial data to voting lists for microtargeting purposes.
"You can purchase everything about individualstheir age,info.shibainu.cz/fotogalerie/vystavy/true-religion-perfect-choice-party-rentals, their income range, their social activities or purchasing habits. There's an extraordinary amount of detail that comes from consumer data companies," he says. With this information, campaigns can cater ads to very specific slices of the population.
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"In the 2004 campaign,sonyampkp.sub18.ro/2013/10/24/click-to-enter-website-awarded-the-nomination-to-sen/, the Bush campaign had begun ads on closedcircuit gym TVs because some of the voters they were trying to reach had regular gym habits. [Microtargeting] is an example of things like that."
Online activity provides an especially rich source of data for use in microtargeting. Campaigns can track people using "cookies" and match Web identities to voting histories,www.worldsings.com/user/blogs/view/name_meriwdtg/id_132639/, party registrations, and indicators to predict how they'll vote. On Pandora, campaigns not only target using this demographic data, they also use your music preferences.
"That's definitely an option we provide, music genre targeting," says Fanucchi of Pandora. "Our advertising campaigns are very custom. We work with [political] campaigns hand in hand."
Pandora members who listen to country music might hear different ads than listeners of an R stations, for example. Neither the campaigns nor the data companies will say which music correlates to which political party, but it's clear that what you listen to plays a part in what ads you hear. Analysis of data by Brian Whitman, cofounder of music intelligence company Echo Nest, found strong correlations between music tastes and political affiliations.
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