Hot Takes: Political Advertising Meets The Streaming Revolution

Even though 2022 is a midterm election year, spending on political advertising is on track to hit record highs, with a recent Kantar/CMAG report predicting that 2022 political ad spend would reach $7.8 billion. Just as significant is their prediction that streaming would account for 15 percent of that amount, or $1.2 billion.

We asked some of our TVREV Thought Leaders Circle members to share their thoughts on how streaming was reshaping the political advertising landscape this year and what to expect down the road.

Bob Ivins, Chief Strategy Officer at InnovidXP focused on how streaming services can provide not only larger audiences, but better and more accurate targeting, especially in local races, with 2022 providing lessons for an even bigger year in 2024.

Political candidates and causes have raised a record amount of money this year – and most of it will be spent between now and election day. In past election cycles a lot of that spend would be put toward local news, but this year more than $1 billion will be spent on CTV, where agencies representing candidates understand (1) that is where the eyeballs are and (2) streaming services bring, for the first time, digital targeting and measurement capabilities to TV. 2022 will be a huge learning year – with the main event coming in 2024!

Joe Marino, Managing Partner & Head of Client Success at MadHive spoke to how all that targeting worked on a local level and how that made for a far more cost-effective buy while still providing the scale that political campaigns require.

With streaming, we can now get very specific with our targeting. We can look for Democratic-leaning swing voters, we can target Congressional districts from a geo perspective rather than from a zip code perspective. So essentially, it's given us the ability to provide digital style hyper-targeting on television screens, which is something political campaigns were never able to access at scale before. And with MadHive serving billions of local CTV impressions across all 210 DMAs every month, we’re uniquely positioned to identify these local voters at a national scale based on various parameters.

 Joe Hirsch, General Manager at SpringServe brought up the fact that “political” isn’t just “Vote For Me!” candidate ads, but takes in issue and cause-based advertising as well. In all instances, Hirsch cautions, programmers need to have moderation protocols in place, especially on otherwise automated  buys. 

Political as a catch-all can be a scary term for someone tasked with managing yield and maximizing audience. Political runs the gamut from cause-based ads, candidates, guns, abortion, and the other sensitive hot buttons that define our contemporary divisive political landscape. Accurate granular automation with manual approval overrides is table stakes for those who want to capture the glut of dollars while maintaining a sense of control over what is suitable for an environment where multiple people are watching one device.

Rohan Castelino, Vice President, Marketing at IRIS.TV focused on the need to look at context—which shows were viewers likely to be more receptive to a political ad and where were they unlikely to have just seen a pod full of political ads or programming that was contradictory to the candidate’s message? 

Reaching voters when they are most open to seeing political advertisements is crucial in this heightened political environment. Many political advertisers are purchasing commercials for the local morning and evening news on linear and streaming TV like Hulu + Live TV, YouTube TV, and others, but playing back-to-back with their opponents' ads, and all within the same ad break. This most certainly isn't getting people's attention and it's imperative to reach voters when they are most receptive to viewing political ads. Consumers have been flocking to ad-supported and free content. One of the key benefits of FAST and AVOD is the ability to target content at the video level to better reach voting audiences.

Publishers who use content data platforms to enable trusted third-party brand safety and contextual intelligence firms to analyze and classify their content are at an advantage and are most desired for political campaigns. This is due to their capacity to target content that's safe and aligns with political candidates messaging. Being linked to inappropriate content is the last thing a politician wants while attempting to win over voters. While some political advertisers believe blocklists will help them avoid this issue, in reality, they end up blocking news, which is the most popular type of content among voters. Publishers that activate their video-level content signals give politicians brand safety and the opportunity to target context, emotion, and sentiment to connect with their audience.

Finally, Fraser Woollard, SVP Business Development, Mediaocean pointed out how Mediaocean’s Prisma made it easy for campaigns to find additional local inventory across a range of CTV providers—a strong selling point in a year that is heavily focused on local Congressional and down ballot campaigns.

There’s an oft-cited phase, “All politics is local.” Political ads too, tend to be focused on the local market. One of things we’ve done that may help the political vertical is to make it easier for traditional local linear buyers to find additional inventory in their local markets by tapping into streaming audio and video providers. In Prisma without changing their workflow, these buyers can choose to reach local viewers by tapping into available local CTV inventory from Premion, Hulu, Roku and others. These sorts of rubber-meets-the-road small innovations are what’s needed to help shift more linear dollars to digital, and we’ve seen this particular program expand rapidly. Given the projected $8B in political spending this year, this is critical for advertising to scale efficiently.

Our TVREV take was that there was enough going on around political advertising and streaming to create an entire report about it, so look for it this Friday.

In addition to the topics listed above, we will do a deep dive into how and why streaming buys can save campaigns millions thanks to better targeting, what both political advertisers and streaming services need to be aware of, and what to look for in 2024 and beyond.

Stay tuned!