The conventional wisdom among ad vendors and agencies is that half or more of political ad budgets during any given election year are spent in the final 45 days before the election.
We’ve rounded that final bend and are now in the home stretch to the midterms – and programmatic companies are like race horses chomping at their bits.
AdExchanger spoke with four political ad sales leaders at prominent ad tech companies that each maintain a political services team. They all agree on the main opportunity for programmatic: CTV.
“Connected TV is boring at this point, because it is what everybody’s talking about,” said Grace Briscoe, client development SVP and head of the political business at Basis Technologies. “But it has been the subject of 90% of my client conversations in the last couple of months.”
Here’s how ad tech companies are adapting to fit the needs of a changing landscape for political ad buyers.
Grace Briscoe, SVP, client development, candidates and causes, Basis Technologies
Dan Fairclough, head of specialized demand, Magnite
Erik Brydges, head of political, Xandr
Kevin Fisher, GM, business development, The Trade Desk
AdExchanger: What’s the big driver of programmatic political ad growth this year?
GRACE BRISCOE: The word unprecedented is so overused, I’m trying to not use it. But to see a midterm year where overall funding is up over the previous presidential year is unheard of. And the rapidity that we’re seeing political campaigns shift dollars to connected TV is unusual in that political campaigns tend to be pretty risk averse and slow to fully adopt new things.
ERIK BRYDGES: CTV is most important because it’s giving political advertisers the ability to target efficiently and reach the biggest screen in the house. Their district or even state isn’t going to neatly line up with TV markets. That’s the best of both worlds.
But beyond making media buying for people’s TVs more efficient, in many cases it’s making voters accessible to down-ballot advertisers for the first time.
DAN FAIRCLOUGH: We say CTV has crossed a tipping point each of the past few cycles, but for reaching voters, it’s going to be pivotal this year.
We’re also seeing fewer reservations. By trial and error, perhaps, campaigns have come to see that the programmatic biddable environment just works better than premium paid on a reserved buy. It’s anecdotal, but my belief is candidates think the scale is there to hold back on video and target CTV heavily starting now through October.
KEVIN FISHER: The lines have blurred between linear TV and CTV. The teams at TV agencies and cross-screen firms that run linear and run digital are no longer about owning one side or the other. They’re focused on achieving the single goal of maximizing reach against a particular audience.
It’s good to see that the political planning teams and the strategy teams have come together, and I think that helps drive investment in CTV.
For an ad tech vendor, what’s the client services focus in politics?
BRISCOE: We work with political agencies and media consultants primarily. A campaign is like a business entity that’s created out of nowhere, exists for a short time and then disappears. Refilling that bucket of clients every year would be exponentially more difficult than the one-to-many relationship between agencies and consultants.
This year, with interest being in CTV, there’s a much greater need for programmatic services from people who understand things like brand safety tech, which audiences scale on these platforms and how creative approvals work.
FISHER: Political buyers have a really hard job, honestly, and need a lot of support from the platforms they’re working with.
In the political space, the conversation goes from, say, the concept of targeting an audience in a specific way to actually executing that buy with new creative in a far more compressed timeframe. That’s nothing like talking to a brand marketer.
On top of that, something that’s not talked about a lot but I see as a huge factor is the physical fitness of political buyers. They’re on 24/7 for five or six weeks. That can wear you down. It’s a really unique group of people who buy in political and a very different side of client services.
FAIRCLOUGH: Being an SSP is an advantageous spot in the ecosystem for providing political advertiser services.
Political advertisers have these eleventh hour needs where it’s late on a Friday but there’s important news and they want to spend a large budget in three days. We have direct connections to publishers, so we can source supply that doesn’t require creative approvals via a PMP. Or we have the close relationships with publishers to get creative approvals.
How do political advertisers approach platforms like Google and Facebook after those companies shook up 2020 races by instituting new political advertising policies on the fly?
BRISCOE: The chaos in 2020 created fear and uncertainty among political clients. There’s now more awareness about overreliance on a platform that might pull the rug out with very little notice.
In August 2020, Adobe announced that political customers had 30 days to migrate campaigns to a new platform. And immediately after the election, Facebook announced a total blackout on political advertising. It was after the election, but the Georgia run-off races were on and the entire Senate hung in the balance – but no Facebook.
Political advertisers definitely absorbed that.
BRYDGES: This year we built all the political districts into the platform following redistricting. That’s something we did with L2 [a voter data provider].
Savvy political advertisers want that ability to target by political geography, which they don’t have when they’re buying linear TV markets or generally online. Having that in one easy package is something they were looking for this time in a platform vendor, because the big platforms have pulled back [on political targeting].
Responses have been edited and condensed.
