Every election season, publishers lose out on billions in digital ad dollars to programmatic middlemen – but sell-side curation could help change that calculus.
On Monday, supply-side platform OpenX launched a new curation and targeting solution specifically for political campaigns together with data provider Givsly. Rather than traditional party affiliation data, the tool allows political advertisers to reach voters based on their values across premium CTV and digital publishers that allow political ads.
Launch partners include Newsweek and CTV platforms Plex, Xumo and Scripps.
The push toward more direct, curated buying coincides with another high‑spending election cycle.
AdImpact projects $10.8 billion in political ad spend this year – a 20% jump from 2022 midterms, just shy of the $11.1 billion spent in 2024’s presidential race.
That’s a lot of money, which explains why publishers want tighter control over pricing and brand safety. Curated deals also help political advertisers avoid unwanted placements and target untapped pools of potential swing voters.
Predictability in political programmatic
Curated deal structures introduce predictability into what’s historically been a chaotic “spray and pray” programmatic political advertising marketplace, said Newsweek CRO Danielle Varvaro. It also “helps reduce duplication in the supply path and supports more stable pricing.”
As a result, she said, publishers aren’t “chasing that short-term spike” during election season and can instead focus on “sustainable yield.” Curation on the sell side also gives publishers greater control over how they participate in the political ad market, Varvaro added, “so we can access the incremental spend while maintaining our governance, our compliance and our brand integrity.”
But how does it work?
Givsly uses data signals from more than 500 nonprofits to create audiences around shared values, such as women’s empowerment or environmental sustainability. OpenX matches those signals against its identity graph to find Givlsy’s audiences across its publisher clients. Those audience segments are packaged into deal IDs that can be activated in direct or programmatic buys.
Givsly’s data is one enrichment layer, said Amanda Forrester, SVP of marketing and communications at OpenX. Buyers can also target specific geos and ZIP codes and zero in on particular voting districts. However, she noted that combining the values-based data with third-party audiences provided by other data vendors would likely constrain supply.
Still, the addition of the Givsly data lets political campaigns reach voters whose values align with their candidate, even without access to party affiliation data. And they can apply that values-based data to find new potential voters even in ZIP codes where the campaign already has extensive data on party affiliation. Which helps activate new voters rather than reinforce existing bases.
Advertisers also get localized reporting on reach and frequency reporting at the county, DMA and ZIP level, and they can optimize campaigns toward outcomes, such as driving clicks to a campaign website or voter registration pages.
Demanding precision
The solution builds on two recent industry shifts that empowered publishers to be more involved in programmatic dealmaking.
One is the rise of sell-side curation over the past few years, which coincided with the second: a growing focus on audience precision over volume, Varvaro said.
Political advertisers are no exception, she said. They’re just as concerned with driving measurable outcomes as any brand, and that’s come out in many of the negotiations for midterm ad buys that have taken place so far this year.
“Historically, political buying could be highly transactional, particularly within the programmatic channels during peak seasons, when buyers are competing aggressively for limited supply,” Varvaro said. But this cycle, political advertisers “are much more focused on curated access to that supply path, and also transparency and compliance.”
For Newsweek, being part of OpenX’s curated political packages is a way to safeguard its supply chain during a period of high demand, while also bolstering its reputation as a premium, centrist news publisher, Varvaro said.
But while Newsweek is open to running political ads across all of its sites and verticals, it won’t run political spots this midterm season on CTV inventory sold through Adprime, the healthcare-focused DSP it acquired last June. That supply is not part of its partnership with OpenX.
Getting pubs back into politics
Still, not every media company is so eager to accept political advertising, given ongoing polarization and brand safety concerns. And political buyers have their own preferences for which publishers they’ll support. OpenX built controls into its system to address hesitation on both sides of the supply chain.
Through the OpenXSelect curation platform, buyers can set custom brand standards and create allow lists of publishers, Forrester said. Because this curation happens on the sell side, buyers can activate those lists in any DSP once without having to reconfigure for each platform.
Publishers, meanwhile, receive advertiser approval lists to ensure the curated packages don’t cannibalize existing deals, Forrester said. They can also review ad creative to make sure it aligns with their values, and they can dictate how stringent the creative review process is.
Some choose to vet every political ad; others whitelist trusted advertisers and skip the review.
Either way, participation is entirely opt-in, according to OpenX, and more than half of its publishers have enabled political advertising.
Even so, participating pubs can still block political ads from appearing on certain site subsections or domains. Political campaigns can only bid on inventory that’s been explicitly approved by the publisher.
OpenX hopes these controls will encourage publishers who’ve pulled back from political advertising altogether over concerns about brand alignment, data governance and privacy compliance to reconsider.
“If you can deliver a solution that has strong guardrails and protections, and that keeps content aligned with other quality publishers,” Forrester said, “then people are more comfortable providing access.”
