President Barack Obama’s reelection effort spent millions on mobile ads that targeted down to the neighborhood level in battleground states, digital operatives for the campaign told Adweek.

And the victors claim targeting on-the-go voters moved the needle, underscoring a 2012 that saw the mobile marketing space seemingly toddle towards significantly impacting the larger advertising world.

In the case of mobile video ads, the Democratic operatives said they got click-through rates from 3 percent to 19.5 percent during the race’s crucial stretch run when Mitt Romney appeared to surge in late October and early November. The promos criticized the GOP candidate’s tax plan and praised Obama’s auto industry bailout, among other examples.

“We knew we had to be in mobile,” said Shannon Lee, the campaign’s digital lead who previously worked at interactive shop Digitas. “The work we did there was exciting because we felt it was directly impacting the election.”

The ads typically zeroed in on young, female and Hispanic voters in Ohio, Michigan, Nevada, Iowa, Florida and Colorado, appearing via mobile properties owned by major regional news outlets such as the Cincinnati Enquirer, Detroit Free Press, Las Vegas Review-Journal, Des Moines Register, Miami Herald and Denver Post. The Obama digital team also bought ads directly from CNN, The Weather Channel, Associated Press and Pandora, leveraging through those publishers’ mobile apps.

And, the Romney campaign focused on television ads that made GOP political consultants richer. Nobody in the the targeted demographics probably even saw them.

You would have thought someone in the GOP would have learned from the drubbing they received in 2008.

And, now again in 2012.