Reflection a couple of weeks after election day is inevitable. But planning for what’s next is where the real impact lies.
Political ad strategies evolved quickly this year, as campaigns moved beyond exclusivity, focusing on flexibility and reach.
Here’s what this cycle taught us and how it will guide our business in the medium term.
Flexes matter
Both sides found value in the flex. Trump campaigned in states he would never win, visiting Coachella, the Jersey Shore and the Bronx. Meanwhile, Harris spent over $500K on The Sphere, basically a supersized DOOH billboard in a city of 500K registered voters and 3 million monthly tourists … not exactly efficient voter targeting.
But flexes work.
The role of future practitioners is to understand the difference between a flex and lighting money (that you might not have) on fire. There is an important lesson here when clients feel the urgent need to advertise in local newspapers, for example. If the media is inefficient and also doesn’t translate to a show of strength, maybe publications like the Lincroft Village News are a hard pass.
Spending patterns shifted
OpenSecrets does an excellent job of tracking spend. But this time, it forgot to zoom out.
After adjusting for inflation, spend was down slightly compared to 2020. Most of that is due to lower-than-traditional spending on the Republican side. (Being famous can save you some money when you run for office.)
The Trump campaign and related organizations raised and spent about half a billion dollars less than Harris. In a traditionally run campaign, much of that would have gone to digital. Over the winter, some harder-hit agencies and vendors will see the downstream effects of lower digital spend from political campaigns. But this was an aberration from the norm rather than a new trend.
At the same time, increasing fragmentation in each corner of the digital ecosystem meant market share for the vast majority of players dropped. Therein lies the evergreen story for political digital advertising: Spending was healthy overall, but not everyone thrived equally.
Persuasion and GOTV differences in tactics
Voters have been moving up the date by which they decide who to vote for since at least 1980.
Sixty days before this election day, we saw about 3% undecided voters across the US. In 1980, that figure was 20%. Even as late as 2016, there were about 8% undecided voters two months before the election.
While the pool of undecided voters approaches zero, this becomes a game of getting out the vote rather than persuasion.
As fun as a good persuasive CTV spot is, persuasion demands the most invasive, provocative, amygdala-stimulating message possible. This is incompatible with two of the most promising formats we have: CTV and streaming audio, both of which require long-term sustained spends to maximize reach. Which means get-out-the-vote tactics are not an evolutionary dead end for marketers.
Social media policies
Political advertising policies vary widely across platforms, reflecting different stances on transparency, targeting and content regulation. So political campaigns are looking to other channels.
Overall, our spend share on social media dropped in favor of a more lubricated ecosystem: CTV.
Exclusive industry deals are for suckers
In early 2024, one large OEM partnered with another managed service platform to provide political advertisers exclusive access to its automatic content recognition (ACR) data for CTV. This partnership promised to enhance targeting and measurement capabilities by using proprietary data, claimed to be available across various geographies and audiences. Exciting, right?
Turns out the deal didn’t generate enough revenue, and the OEM pulled out approximately eight months later… then started facilitating direct sales without its named partner.
Simply put, there are enough on-ramps to reach any audience that it doesn’t make sense for any publisher to sign on exclusive partners.
SPO won, and SSPs > DSPs
Supply-side platforms (SSPs) are gaining ground over demand-side platforms (DSPs) in controlling the ad buying process due to the rise of supply-path optimization (SPO) and market education.
SPO allows buyers to streamline and prioritize specific SSPs, creating a more direct, efficient and transparent path to inventory, which reduces costs and minimizes fraud risks.
For political ad buying, this advantage is especially valuable as campaigns increasingly demand premium, brand-safe and fraud-free inventory with precise targeting capabilities. With SPO, SSPs can offer more control over inventory quality and pricing, which resonates in political campaigns where accountability, transparency and budget efficiency are critical. As a result, SSPs that are also ad servers are positioning themselves as essential partners, using SPO to grow their influence and revenue in the political ad space.
Linear vs. digital shops
It turns out that digital vendors have few moats in politics, and public affairs and linear buyers continue to win CTV dollars.
What’s next? Convergent evolution between digital and linear. You will see this process accelerate, in part, because the political digital ad complex is undergoing unexpected pressure from a president-elect who shows ambivalence toward paid media, especially voter-targeted digital. Upstream vendors trying to draw the straightest line possible between them and money will also speed this convergence along.
A murky market
Competitive political spending research from AdImpact and Ascend shed light on campaign spends across major platforms including Google, Meta and some CTV options. However, it will always be incomplete and potentially unreliable, as it often lacks data from alternative ad platforms, private deals and programmatic channels, which make up a significant portion of political ad spending.
The system can be gamed; we can run an ad campaign that is 100% reportable or 0% reportable.
Consequently, while research reveals spending trends and has become a necessary tool, the limited scope and partial visibility research firms have means the data should be interpreted with caution. Meanwhile, hybrid ads by candidates and independent expenditure groups made this tracking even messier.
2025 will bring a great deal of turnover, as the economics of the political vertical are dynamic and unforgiving.
Winning business in the next cycle will require understanding not just the personalities at the other end of the Northeast Corridor, but also the lessons from the last several cycles.
“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.
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