Comcast Political Ads Director To Lead Newly Formed LoopMe Division
Porter Geeks Out On Politics At LoopMe
Robin Porter has a fascination with politics — one reason that LoopMe hired her to run the company’s newly formed political advertising division.
At LoopMe, Porter will build out the company’s political agency and advertiser partnerships and campaigns, offering solutions to measure real-time voter sentiment and deliver hyper-targeted audience segments.
The company will integrate artificial intelligence (AI) into the strategy.
“I give Comcast the credit for sparking my interest in political advertising,” said Porter, who worked at Comcast for nine years. “Before being asked to support political advertising, I had no idea how much I would geek out over it.”
Porter came from Comcast after nine years of leading strategy teams for TV and streaming advertising sales. Prior to Comcast, Porter worked in the non-profit sector.
The Winterberry Group believes political ads will carry the revenue for the ad industry this year.
The firm predicts $17 billion of political ad spend this year — up from $10 billion during the last presidential cycle.
This will be good for media owners, but not-so-great for brand marketers. Political spend is estimated to account for about 30% of total ad sales growth in 2024.
Advertisers this year will struggle with the loss of key digital targeting capabilities with the degradation of third-party cookies in Google’s Chrome browser.
The goal is to support candidates across the entire voter ballot.
When asked to cite campaigns she will be working with this year, Porter said: “There’s incredible interest around predictive AI for candidates in national and local,” adding that the company is talking with campaigns related to the “presidential race for parties on both sides.”
AI will help to identify voter audiences for real-time feedback that could become a targeting segment, optimization, and measurability for performance.
“What has been missing in political ad campaigns is the ability to optimize in real time, especially during a presidential year,” she said. “This will provide the opportunity, especially for advocacy campaigns, whether the campaign is driving awareness.”
In her spare time, Porter reads books. The latest is a reread by author Jim Collins, who writes a lot about how to hire the correct talent, which will come in handy as she starts to build out an entire group of people who will support political advertising within LoopMe.
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