Political campaigns are set to spend more than $11 billion on advertising in the midterms, and a growing share will land on connected television (CTV). But shifting the budget to streaming without shifting the thinking behind it can lead to a tremendous amount of waste.
For years, the industry has debated linear versus streaming and broadcast versus CTV, and how quickly budgets should migrate from one to the other. As viewers have moved to streaming, advertisers have followed them. The problem is that many campaigns are bringing old broadcast habits along for the transition.
Campaigns already spend enormous amounts of time and money determining which voters matter. They build voter files and modeled audiences. They identify likely supporters, likely opponents, potential donors, infrequent voters and persuadable voters whose decisions could change an election’s outcome. That same audience-first thinking should carry through to how they use CTV.
A TV mentality won’t cut it in CTV
Traditional television buying has always required campaigns to work in broad strokes. They choose media markets, programs, dayparts and demographic groups likely to include the voters they want to reach. Inevitably, their ads also reach plenty of people who are irrelevant to the campaign’s objective. CTV gives campaigns tools to be much more precise.
Yet too many campaigns revert to broadcast-era targeting strategies when approaching CTV. They use streaming as another way to reach a large television audience, buying impressions against wide geographies or audience groups when they could be much more deliberate about who sees their ads.
Campaigns should begin with the voters they need to reach and use CTV’s targeting capabilities to find them. They should also identify people who have already taken the desired action or are extremely unlikely to move, rather than continuing to spend money reaching them. The objective should be to make every impression work more effectively, especially in an election with a fixed deadline and a finite universe of voters who can affect the outcome.
The case for audience intelligence
Viewing behavior can make that strategy even smarter. How people consume media signals where and how to reach them. A household that spends hours watching free, ad-supported streaming services presents a very different advertising opportunity from one that pays to avoid commercials whenever possible.
Imagine that both households contain voters a campaign needs to persuade. The first may be readily reachable through a CTV campaign. The second may rarely see the campaign’s 30-second streaming spot, no matter how good it is. That knowledge lets the campaign put more emphasis on reaching those voters through online video, social, pre-roll, audio, other digital channels and, yes, even broadcast.
Those insights are most valuable when they are available early enough to affect the strategy. Audience intelligence should help campaigns determine who belongs in the CTV buy, who needs to be reached elsewhere, how to divide resources among channels and how often individual voters should encounter a message. It can also inform creative decisions when different audiences consume media in different ways.
That requires campaigns to share audience information more broadly across the people making strategic, creative and media decisions. Media teams often have useful information about how audiences consume content that never reaches the people developing messages or producing creative. When teams consider those insights earlier, campaigns can build communications programs around actual audience behavior rather than assembling separate media plans after major strategic decisions have already been made.
A crucial moment for campaigns on CTV
As billions of dollars pour into advertising during the final weeks of the midterms, the campaigns that get the most from CTV will use the data and targeting capabilities available to reach the voters who matter, learn from how those audiences consume media and adjust the rest of their communications accordingly.
Otherwise, the consequences could be measured in close races lost and opportunities squandered. CTV can give campaigns the edge in those races, but only if they use it as the precision tool it is, not as broadcast by another name.
“On TV & Video” is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video.
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