This Innovator Spotlight from our newest report, Political Ads In Streaming: How Local and CTV Innovations Are Changing The Game offers a behind-the-scenes look with Joe Marino, Managing Partner & Head of Client Success at MadHive


ALAN WOLK (AW): Why is streaming so popular with political campaigns? What else can it do that linear can’t?

JOE MARINO (JW): The benefit of streaming is that it's a digital version of traditional linear media. Same content, same screen size, but with the ability to apply the benefits of programmatic ad buying. What that means is we can do more than just the sort of standard  “Adults 25 to 54”, targeting that you get on linear. 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.

AW: How is MadHive helping campaigns get a handle on streaming? Do you have a team dedicated to working with political campaigns?

JM: Yes we do have a dedicated team. We sort of have to, because it is very common for us to get a call saying “I need this to go live right now and run for three days and clear X amount of dollars,” and it’s critical that we have people in place who can help support, troubleshoot, answer questions. We have engineers, product, client success, and revenue strategy, and we’re all working together to provide guidance to political campaigns.

AW: How are you dealing with overfrequency which seems to be a real problem with streaming, where the same ad can show up multiple times within the same pod.

JM:  To your point, overfrequency happens when an agency goes and partners with 15 different vendors, and they're all using different technologies to run media in the same area. That’s a real challenge with political advertising because they often want to blitz an area over a short period. What happens is they will get a certain sum of money that they need to spend in just two or three days—usually right before the election. So they’re not all that interested in effective household targeting. That said, overfrequency can result in negative impressions, so we have tools that can help clients guard against that.

With MadHive, they can log into our platform and set a frequency cap at a household level of say, one per hour or one per day—whatever frequency they feel is warranted—and then we can ensure that these households either see a commercial with a different message or a completely different non-political ad.

AW: We’re seeing predictions that political ad spend on streaming is going to be up this year versus 2020, close to $10 billion. Where is that money coming from: digital, linear or both?

JM: It's from both. Prior to streaming TV being a thing, there was online video. And those budgets were pretty healthy. But as streaming TV started to grow, those budgets started shifting over very quickly to take advantage of the premium linear content as well as the TV screen as a device you can now target. 

With digital, people are looking at Facebook and other platforms and evaluating who they are really reaching there, wondering what their position on political advertising is going to be, given everything that happened in 2020 and whether it’s the best place to plant their flag. So we’re seeing campaigns shifting money to streaming from digital too.

Money is also being shifted from linear, especially now that the big media companies all have their own streaming services. So say you are planning your buys and you are talking to your local TV sales rep. They are going to try and upsell you on Tubi and local streaming because combining it all makes sense—viewership is shifting and you want to get all the reach you can.  

AW: What sort of data can political campaigns get access to on streaming that they can’t get on linear?

JM:   What’s key with streaming is because it is digital, you get a deterministic rather than a probabilistic feed. 

With linear, you’re just getting a confirmation that your spot ran on this channel at this time. In streaming, we're getting a lot more information, all of which is tied to a specific household based on data from IP addresses, device IDs and geolocation. That data is obviously non-PII, protected and privacy safe.

There’s another benefit to having all those data signals coming  in, and that is they can be leveraged towards performance-based attribution or measurement. So you can see which people were exposed to your ad, and if they then went to the website, or downloaded an app or walked into a physical location to vote. 

Better still, you are getting all that data from streaming at a deterministic one to one match. That’s a huge step up from linear where at most you can determine that your ad ran, and then within a three minute window, there was some web activity, so we’re going to attribute that activity to your ad. That’s probabilistic data and it’s not really as valuable.