Election 2016 will be won or lost on mobile

From Trump trucker hats, to pant-suit t-shirts, and even a $75 “Guaca Bowle,” advertising for the 2016 election season is shaping up to be more intense than ever before. Once upon a time in America, presidential campaigns were actually considered taboo. In fact, George Washington felt it would be “dishonorable” to campaign for the first presidency in 1792. That’s certainly not the case anymore. We’ve come a long way since Truman’s Whistle Stop Tour and “I Like Ike!” television ads, but the elections of the last decade have made it clear that technology has forever resurfaced the path to the presidency. Today, the road to the White House is paved with smartphones, tablets, and mobile-first strategy.

The real winner of the 2012 election was social media. It is widely recognized that a major factor in Obama’s re-election was his campaign’s expert use of social media. An early adopter of the then-2-year-old Instagram, Obama posted on average seven times more than his opponent, Mitt Romney. We learned that if the would-be presidents of the future aren’t adept on social media, they won’t be able to connect to an important segment of their voters.

{mosads}So what is the ticket to the Oval Office in 2016? If a candidate is serious about being elected, they have to be serious about mobile, and for a few key reasons.

The presence of smartphones among the American public has skyrocketed since 2012, with mobile video consumption surging alongside. This year, Americans have spent 51 percent of their time with digital media on mobile devices, and this number will only continue to rise. There are more smartphones in the US than televisions, and time on those smartphones has overtaken TV for the first time.  The devices we all love so much come with a critical upside for advertisers: most mobile ads are unskippable. TV ads send most viewers scrambling for the DVR remote, and very often straight to their handheld devices. Until mobile ad blocking becomes more widespread, these devices are perhaps the most direct conduit to the eyes of voters left for this elections’ candidates.

It doesn’t take an exit poll to know how emotionally connected our fellow Americans are to their cell phones — they sleep next to us, live in our pockets all day, record our most precious moments, and connect us to one another. This personal connection is also what will bring back the kind of powerfully emotional responses political ad campaigns were once known for. Even if you were not alive to experience Johnson’s atomic bomb ad of 1964, you probably know about it. With the rich data we are able to cull on digital paired with the intimate nature of our devices, mobile gives us the opportunity to make this historic kind of impact once again.  

If mobile video is the format, then programmatic is the technology that will get the right ads with the right creative to the right audiences at the right time. This technology didn’t gain serious traction until 2013, and will be the game-changer in 2016. While mobile affords a new forum for establishing that emotional connection, programmatic ensures that the message is delivered quickly and to highly targeted audiences. Real-time visibility into how ads are performing give digital teams, for the first time ever, the ability to optimize and iterate ad creative on-the-fly – something impossible to achieve for traditional campaigns.

Mobile’s ubiquitous presence in our lives will make it one of the most effective ways to reach constituents this election cycle. Combined with the speed and scale that programmatic buying offers, candidates have access to unprecedented reach – if they can use it correctly. Ultimately, the candidate who can successfully tap into the country’s hyper-connected network of smartphone users and skillfully harness the power of programmatic will have the edge in what we can expect to be a narrow election. In 2016 the Presidency will be won with taps and swipes and smart, creative mobile video.

Balabanov is Advertising Account director at AOL.