Mitt Romney's campaign is looking to find ways to get their ads in front of people who don't usually watch television commercials.

The New York Times looks at Romney's digital strategy to target people who consume media online.

Instead of buying advertising real estate on specific web sites, they actually target specific online audiences.

The Romney campaign and a team of online behavior analysts have spent 18 months trying to fight television advertising’s law of diminishing returns, sifting through data on the browsing habits of tens of millions of computer users as the campaign builds a richly detailed cache of potential supporters.

In doing so, Mr. Romney’s strategists are hoping to turn the Web into a political persuasion tool, signaling a shift in the way modern campaigns view digital advertising. It is no longer merely a supplement for traditional media like television. In some cases, it is a substitute entirely.

A survey conducted last May on voters’ television viewing habits, which is often cited by Romney advisers, found that 31 percent of likely voters had not watched television “live” — that is, at the time it was being broadcast, as opposed to online or on a recording device — in the previous week. And of the 17 percent who said they mostly watched programs recorded on devices like a D.V.R., a large majority skipped through ads most of the time.  The nationwide telephone survey was conducted by Public Opinion Strategies, a Republican polling firm, and SEA Polling and Strategic Design, a Democratic polling firm. 

Using outside digital strategists, the campaign analyzed surveys from Democratic and Republican pollsters that determined, among other things, how often people were watching live television. Then strategists took that data, paired it with browsing histories and built a model to identify voters who are not likely to be watching live television.