Digital advertising for upcoming political campaigns: onboarding tips for agencies.

For political agencies, every second counts. As advertising ramps up for the 2026 midterms, tight campaign timelines demand rapid execution; waiting days to activate voter lists is far from ideal.

Traditional onboarding methods can be slow and inefficient, and agencies need a better way to quickly and effectively onboard voter lists to The Trade Desk and other popular destinations. That's where Enhanced Onboarding on Deep Sync One can help.

This streamlined, self-service solution improves match rates and enables agencies to activate voter audiences fast—often within hours. With enhanced speed and accuracy, political advertisers can maximize reach, execute campaigns more quickly, and improve ROI.

In this guide, we'll cover the challenges agencies face with traditional onboarding and activation, a solution to improve this process, and the benefits of Enhanced Onboarding.

Onboarding and Activating Audiences

One of our clients, a full-service political advertising and public affairs agency, sought a streamlined process to onboard files for their one-to-one advertising initiatives. They had experience with other popular onboarding solutions, including direct ingestion into ad platforms, but hadn't found the right blend of efficiency and effectiveness.

Another client, a full-service digital agency serving some of the biggest names in politics, sought a fast and reliable way to activate their clients' voter lists. They had experience with other popular onboarding solutions, but none offered the speed necessary for their clients' most time-sensitive campaigns.

Enhanced Onboarding for Political Advertising Agencies

For both clients, who rely on The Trade Desk for their audience activation, we proposed Enhanced Onboarding. This simple, self-service solution within the Deep Sync One audience-building platform matches and onboards new names in hours, even for lists of millions. In addition to accelerating delivery times, Enhanced Onboarding increases match rates to key programmatic and social destinations, including The Trade Desk.

While average match rates in the industry hover between 30% and 50%, The Trade Desk offers a better match rate—over 56%—due to the company's use of UIDs. Deep Sync's Enhanced Onboarding to The Trade Desk can raise these match rates by an additional 25% on average.

How does Enhanced Onboarding to The Trade Desk work?

Enhanced Onboarding ingests first-party datasets and utilizes Deep Sync's robust identity graph to match customer data. A series of user-defined identifiers enables Deep Sync to search for and identify consumers within the graph.

The inclusion of online and offline identifiers, including UID2s, enhances the outcome of onboarding results with increased match rates. In most cases, audiences can be enabled on The Trade Desk and other key programmatic and social platforms within 24 hours, if not sooner. In fact, many users report delivery times of less than 90 minutes.

An Improved Ability to Reach Voters

After making an account on the Deep Sync One platform, our client experienced a simple and quick uploading process. They were able to view their initial match rate, as well as how many households matched their DSP.

Similarly, our other agency client was able to upload their clients' voter files. They experienced a quick turnaround time and impressive match rates, plus a significant increase in reach for their clients with the use of Enhanced Onboarding's household expansion capability.

With household expansion, additional records from the matched individual's household are added to the overall audience.

Seven Benefits of Enhanced Onboarding for Political Marketing

The 2026 midterms are quickly approaching. Whether your client's goal is to improve candidates' turnout on election day or encourage voters to support ballot initiatives, here are seven ways that Enhanced Onboarding can contribute to successful campaigns and improve your political advertising services.

1. Simple, Transparent Process

Enhanced Onboarding is a self-service solution that can be accessed immediately upon creation of a Deep Sync One account. The contract process is streamlined; users need only agree to Deep Sync's Terms & Conditions in the Deep Sync One platform.

2. Competitive Pricing

Pricing is based on a cost-per-thousand model; there are no platform access fees, subscriptions, or monthly spend requirements. Users pay only for records (based on input, not matches or output) that are active in a given month. Records can be deactivated within the platform at any time.

3. Deterministic Matching

Ingested data is matched deterministically to Deep Sync's identity graph, which includes CTV IDs, IP addresses, MAIDs, and UID2s. Our identity graph is built from the ground up on a framework of direct mail-grade name and postal address information linked to online identifiers where shared personal information is present.

4. Relevant Scaling

Deep Sync matches exclusively to real-world individuals and households to ensure the highest fidelity when delivering audiences to your preferred destination. For The Trade Desk, we scale based on UID2s, which reduces instances of unusable matches and eliminates waste.

5. Accelerated Delivery Times

While other services take days—if not weeks—to ingest and process client data, Enhanced Onboarding frequently delivers audiences to The Trade Desk in less than an hour from the time of submission.

6. Individual- and Household-Level Matching

Control the precision of Enhanced Onboarding by toggling between the individual- and household-level matching options. While individual-level matching is more precise, household-level matching extends your reach to other members of the household, ultimately increasing your overall match rates.

7. Add Greater Focus to Your Campaigns with Customer Segmentation

Power highly relevant messaging by creating customer segments prior to onboarding voter lists. Our customer segmentation feature enables you to achieve your targeting goals through the application of Deep Sync's demographic and interest data attributes. These attributes serve as filters to identify and group select members of your target audience. Multiple segments can be created from a single voter file.

Improve Your Digital Strategy

As we head toward the 2026 midterms, improving your digital strategy will ensure your campaigns are election-ready. Begin today with Deep Sync's Enhanced Onboarding and experience an average match rate boost of 25%. Log in to Deep Sync One to upload your file.

Jeanette Rumsey

Sr. Product Marketing Manager, Deep Sync

Jeanette is Senior Product Marketing Manager at Deep Sync, focused on data-driven marketing, direct mail, customer data, and audience strategy. With 20+ years of experience, she helps businesses maximize data quality, campaign performance, and cross-channel marketing success.

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