PhillyDeals: Election campaigns are big business for Fort Washington firm

Jeff Dittus and Rich Masterson are happy about the Republicans' surge in the polls for this November's elections to Congress.

Not just because it's their party.

Also because they own and operate CampaignGrid L.L.C., a Fort Washington firm they say is finding and targeting online voters for 70 GOP candidates and political donor groups, backing a range of hopefuls, from Nevada tea-party conservative U.S. Senate candidate Sharron Angle to Main Line-Berks County moderate U.S. Rep. Jim Gerlach (R., Pa.).

That's up from 30 races last year, when their clients included Christopher J. Christie's successful campaign to beat then-New Jersey Gov. Jon S. Corzine. Dittus says he's increased staff to 15, from last year's eight, and added an office near Republican National Committee headquarters in Washington.

How's this work? For example: After Corzine backers associated Christie with health-care spending cuts, including opposition to breast-cancer exams, CampaignGrid pushed an ad noting Christie's mother was a breast-cancer survivor. As Dittus said, "We put that video in an online ad and sent it to the moms of New Jersey," targeting swing districts. "Our polling showed it worked."

CampaignGrid says it's built a database of tens of millions of registered voters. "We take the national voter file, the list of every registered voter in the U.S., with their voting history and party affiliation. And a lot of information on them as people - consumer information, income level, education, male-female, ethnicity, all the things that you're terribly interested in as a voter.

"We take that data and, in a non-personally-identifiable way, we know you're a Republican executive who went to college and lives in Gwynedd Valley. We tailor our message to that individual based on those situations.

"We run Gerlach's TV ads on the Internet so there is no waste. With broadcast TV, he's advertising in New Jersey and Delaware to people who can't vote for him." The firm tries out different messages and focuses on those that get the best national polling response - for example, antitax ads in wealthy neighborhoods.

Online targeting "eliminates the need for focus groups" and lets campaigns cut back on polling and spokespeople.