Meet Increment Influence: How We Turn Lobbying Experience Into Precision Ad Targeting

We're pulling back the curtain on something we've been running with our public affairs partners behind the scenes for months.

It's called Increment Influence. It lives at the intersection of two things we already do well, and it solves a problem that's stumped advertisers trying to reach decision-makers for years: reaching the small, elite cluster of people in a state who actually decide what happens, not the 272,000 who just happen to live near the capitol.

The Problem With Targeting Decision-Makers

Standard ad targeting doesn't find the Governor's chief of staff. Or the committee chair's legislative director. Or the senior lobbyist who's been working a specific bill for two years. These people don't show up in interest-based segments, lookalike models, or contextual buys. The only option has historically been spray-and-pray, which leaves you overpaying to reach a massive geography and hoping the right 200 people saw your ad.

Increment Influence solves that.

How Increment Influence Works

It connects two things we've built independently:

• Influence Analysis Studio maps the network, identifying the decision-makers, staff, donors, lobbyists, media, and coalition leaders who shape a specific issue in a specific state.
• Increment makes that map addressable, turning the intelligence into a verified, activatable ad audience across CTV, social, programmatic, and premium inventory.

The result is a small-by-design segment of a few hundred to a few thousand verified people. You can track them across the screens they actually use, and see exactly who is viewing your ads.

You Know Exactly Who You're Reaching

Most political ad targeting is a black box. You spend, you hope, you get a report with reach numbers that tell you nothing about whether the right people saw anything.

Increment Influence is fully auditable. You can see the audience. You can see delivery. You can audit exactly who is in your audience. Think of it this way: Increment Influence offers greater transparency and reporting than sending a personal email to your targets.

We Built the Tool We Wished We Had

Most vendors hear "I need to reach legislators" and immediately start thinking about impressions they can sell you. The ask becomes inventory, and your campaign is just another line item.

We flipped that model, because we've been in the room.

We've served in legislative offices. We've run advocacy campaigns at the federal and state level. We've sat across from principals who needed to move a handful of legislators, only to be handed a targeting segment with 80,000 people in it.

So we started from the other direction: who do you actually need to move? Then we use every tool available to find exactly those people online.

That means hand-selected seed names from people with lived experience in the policy world, expanded using primary-source records, in-house voter data, real-time location visitation, and public records. And once we have our names, we're not done. Every name is scored on positional authority, proximity to decision-makers, donor overlap, issue activity, and media footprint. The higher the influence, the greater the weight.

The result is a small, precise audience built around your goal: get your message inside that inner circle until it moves the needle.

"Influencers" Aren't Just Elected Officials

That word gets overused. In our framework, an influencer is anyone whose opinion, vote, or platform moves outcomes on your issue. That includes:

• Corporate boards and C-suite executives navigating regulatory exposure
• Federal advisory committee members shaping agency rulemaking
• State legislative committee members controlling whether a bill gets a hearing
• Industry coalition and PAC leadership who move money and endorsements
• Statehouse press and trade media who shape what staffers read each morning
• Mega-donors and senior political operatives who move candidates

If it's a niche audience of decision-makers, we can build a custom segment for it. We already have pre-built audiences live for 10 states, the Trump Administration, and several issue verticals.

Pre-built audiences are ready to serve. Custom segments take about a week to build. If you can describe the people you need to reach, we can find them.

Ready to activate your audience with us? Contact IMGE today.