Political Advertising Dollars Flow to CTV

Political ad campaigns track herds of voters as they migrate from one channel or platform to another. If voters opt to check out candidate ads on TikTok, political teams will target them, even if some find the service controversial. 

In 2024, political advertising experts expect CTV to gain more ad investment, picking up ad share from target voters and shedding linear services. Digital political ad spend will hit $3.46 billion in 2024, according to eMarketer, “45% of which will go to connected TV (CTV).” That’s up 137% from 2020. “AdImpact forecasts ad spending with CTV to increase by 33% compared to the 2022 midterms,” adds Forbes.

While switching to streaming is no surprise, changes in the political sphere are usually realized during election cycles when everything is at stake. In most campaigns, the initial focus is on capturing voters’ attention — which once was a gradual process. Still, messaging and targeting start broadly and become more precise throughout a campaign.

Yet, in the presidential race, getting acquainted may not be top–of–mind for everyone. Voters believe they already know the two presumptive candidates, Trump and Biden, and swaying uncommitted voters will be expensive but not impossible. A March USA Today survey indicates that nearly one in four voters consider themselves persuadable. 

It’s not hard to see where the campaigns will concentrate their spending — or on which demographics. They’re expected to spend the bulk of their money in battleground states such as Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Nevada, Georgia and Arizona. The Trump campaign recently kicked off its national campaign with radio spots appealing to black voters in swing states.  

The CTV Payoff  

How will targeting voters on CTV differ from linear channels? Richer data mining. Identifying where swing voters congregate and how to reach them efficiently makes all the difference to political operatives. CTV picks up IP addresses to help isolate locations, making presenting contextually relevant ads to voters in specific zip codes or precincts easier. In short, CTV empowers political advertisers to gather more data and use it to fine-tune their targeting and improve their return on ad spend.  

Viant’s people-based omnichannel DSP utilizes Viant Household ID to deterministically identify key voting audiences and reach them across premium, brand-safe environments. The Viant DSP links all devices, increasing scale across programmatic inventory sources such as CTV, video, display, digital out-of-home (DOOH) and audio. 

This type of deterministic integration enables advanced attribution so political operatives can better determine lift in favorability, issue awareness and overall voter intent for political candidates. The attribution helps advertisers understand the added value of digital efforts on existing political broadcast TV channels with incremental reach measurement. It also enables attribution on all touch points on user paths to conversion. 

Reach out to a Viant representative to learn more, or get started with us.