The 2024 election cycle was soaked with paid media. An estimated $10.53 billion in ads were shown to voters, and Democrats outspent Republicans.
Then Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election with less of a paid media presence than many expected. So does paid media even matter?
“There are a lot more people questioning that, says Power Interactive CEO Jordan Lieberman, who handled 1,000 digital paid media campaigns this election cycle. Kamala Harris was “well funded” with a “textbook” campaign, he says on the podcast. But Trump was “heavy on personality. And that carries a lot more weight than paid media in a lot of cases.”
Where political advertisers spent their budgets in 2024
In the 2024 election cycle, media spend shifted to addressable formats. Billboards, terrestrial radio, newspapers, magazines and broadcast television will see their share of the political dollar shrink, Lieberman says.
“Every dollar, every incremental increase in spend will be going to addressable media,” he says. That piece includes most digital formats, including CTV. But it also includes some older formats, like direct mail, which are old-school addressable.
But there’s one digital format where spend declined this election cycle: social media. Lieberman estimated that Meta’s share of dollar dropped about 50% this year. “Meta has done a whole lot of work behind the scenes to make it really unappealing to run ads on their platform,” he says. And other social networks, like TikTok, accept zero political advertising.
“On one hand, political advertising is a lot of money to these social networks,” he says. “On the other hand, for the 1% boost they see in revenue, it’s a 50% increase in headaches. So I get why they don’t want it.”
With more CTV, less social media – and a candidate who won commanding attention without an accompanying heft of paid media – the 2024 election holds many lessons for marketers about the state of digital advertising and online attention.
