Ready for Super Tuesday? 🗳️
With the US primaries live and Super Tuesday almost here, the political ad spend in digital is at an all time high, amidst a highly charged political landscape.
Year 2024 is said to be a global election year with a record number of countries holding polls. With all the attention around the ballot this year, it comes as no surprise that the ad spend for political campaigns in the US alone is forecasted to surpass $16 billion, up 31.2% from the last presidential election in 2020.
Out of this massive ad budget, the most interesting statistic is the growth of spend on streaming TV where advertisers are expected to invest around $1.5 billion on the channel, that is, around 45% of all political digital spend!
And that amount still is in no way commensurate with the tv consumption behavior of voters and potential voters, who are said to be split 50-50 between traditional and streaming. This huge misalignment begs the question: how can media owners merchandise their inventory in a way that appropriately matches demand and ad budgets?
This is even more pertinent in the current election year, where the digital advertising landscape is still trying to recover from the political ad blocks of 2022, owing to the misinformation storm surrounding the presidential race in 2020. With Xandr’s ominous ban on political advertising on its platform announced late last year, the situation is more challenging than ever for publishers wanting to monetize the massive political opportunity without compromising on ad legitimacy and transparency.
Realizing the impending magnitude of this predicament, ElementalTV partnered with Safe Exchange, owned by A Parent Media Co. Inc. (APMC), earlier this year for the integration of AdCurate Ad Safety data into its product suite for real-time, high-efficacy ad blocking. Through a combination of AI and real human review, this capability delivers real-time, actionable metadata for inbound video ads. Better ad metadata means better blocking of ads that do not meet quality standards or are inappropriate for a publisher’s audience.
And with added support for advanced political advertising content data, publishers can block political ads on a more granular level than just yes/no. Ads are classified on sentiment (positive vs attack ads), ad type (PACs vs Candidate ads), or topic (for example, gun issues). This enables publishers on ElementalTV’s platform to still capture some of those political ad dollars without risking their audience. This essentially means that publishers can now open the floodgates and be confident that anything that doesn't meet guidelines will be caught, driving increased bid density, fill, and CPMs.
