Political advertisers' focus shifts towards connected TV | WARC | The Feed

Political advertisers' focus shifts towards connected TV

A year out from 2022’s mid-term elections, the media attention of political advertisers is shifting away from the digital channels they have been using successfully for some years and towards connected television (CTV).

What’s changed since last time?

• The tech has moved on, more CTV inventory is available.
• During the pandemic an increasing number of people started using streaming services.
• Previous targeting options are becoming limited by the need to move away from using cookies. 
• Platforms like YouTube and Facebook have introduced new measures to control political advertising.

What can we expect? 

• Campaigns are likely to go broader with higher quality content. 
• CTV ads are not nearly so tightly regulated as traditional TV ads and they can still be targeted at a household rather than individual level.
• Figures from analytics firm AdImpact, cited by Axios, indicate that spending on CTV will exceed that on the usual digital channels (mobile, tablet, desktop) by around $200m ($1.5bn vs $1.3bn).

Key quote

“Some of the proxy metrics for success – reach, frequency – will actually become harder to measure, which can be a positive and force greater focus on outcomes, like tying advertising data to actual opinion shift from polling” – Mike Schneider, partner at Bully Pulpit Interactive.

Sourced from Axios