You’ve gotta feel pain for the saturated swing staters. It’s not enough that they got pelted with texts and emails, surrounded by radio, TV and digital advertising, but there are people coming to the door.  

On Wednesday America will be united in one thing for sure — a welcome break from political ads. $16 billion was spent on political campaigns this election cycle; that’s almost $50 per American. $11 billion of that went to local broadcasters and streamers targeting ZIP Codes (now with no frequency caps!).

No matter how much you duck into Netflix or catch up on politics without interruptions on C-SPAN, the madness unleashed by unlimited Citizen’s United cash combined with any number of dystopian bot-farm bullies and foreign friskiness can only mean a spin factory for us all.

Now that election day is upon us, I set off to find some data from this spin cycle that can deepen my understanding of the attention economy. Some data that isn’t a poll funded by an agenda, but receipts of views and ad impressions that reveal real behaviors by companies and people.

A work in progress, but as of election day, here is what I’ve found:

These 20 national ads were seen more than 9.3 billion times 10/1-11/03.

The ads weren’t actually saturating the TV programming that delivers the political and hard news analysis. October advertising against news was (ironically) dominated by health & auto insurance marketers, vitamins & supplement companies, low-cost cellular providers and six sectors of pharma, per an analysis of iSpot data.  

That said, those numbers are perhaps skewed by the pure domination of Fox News and the habituated audience it delivers entertainment to.

Consider this view of October comparing four networks by ad reach:

While politics will show up during ad breaks of news programming somewhat, campaigns tend to linger in genres and day-parts where people aren’t actually trying to see that kind of content. Most of Trump’s national spend went to the NFL (79%) and college football (4%) over an 8-week stretch, but generated only 40% of his reach. In TV nerd talk, that means the campaign picked up a lot of cheap inventory elsewhere while spending on the big tickets. Harris also followed a football strategy, but to a lesser extent.

But there is a bigger issue at play — people are becoming harder to reach on TVs. According to Inscape’s forthcoming Q3 2024 Market Trends 61% of TVs “solely” streamed content, while about 35% tuned into a mix of streaming and traditional sources, such as Cable/Satellite or Over-The-Air (OTA) signals.

While the POTUS battle was in predictable battleground states, Congressional and special interest ballot initiatives pushed local dollars past broadcast stations and into streaming audiences, which offer targeting based on zip-code level granularity and deeper demographic profiles. Here is a states breakdown from Madhive, which powers CTV and omni-channel advertising for local media companies across the country.

The TV battles are limited to broadcast or cable or ads on traditional streaming services. There is the matter of earned and shared media as John Cassillo uncovered diving into Chartbeat data, Trump almost doubled the number of news articles compared to Harris.  Meanwhile, Tubular Labs showed News & Politics media creators in the U.S. generated 2.6 billion views on YouTube alone in October 2024. 

That category viewership kinda resembled TV, as the most views came from videos that were 5-10 minutes in length (549 million views), vs. those that ran 20+ minutes (512 million).

And while video viewing can look the same across devices, the difference between TV viewing and the creator economy is massive. TV broadcasts one-to-many, social connects many to many, many, many. Consider this chart from CreatorIQ’s State of Creator Report for 2024-25 showing the network effects from creator fueled engagement.

“Creators are an undeniable force in the cultural conversation, with the ability to augment the reach and connection of traditional media,” said Chris Harrington, CEO at CreatorIQ. “While traditional media is still incredibly important, the data shows that creators can be everywhere, all the time, all at once in a way that traditional media can’t. We’ve reached the tipping point, and creators are the most effective way to drive value — whether that’s awareness, revenue or even votes.”