How CTV and DOOH are growing in this political season for small agencies

by Antoinette Siu • May 3, 2024 • 4 min read •

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In some cases, this allows smaller independents to fuel local campaigns and make data more widely available, said Jonathan Burns, principal at Population Science, an agency focused on programmatic in politics. He said that there will be more opportunities to utilize it.

“Since the last cycle, more things have been programmed. [the presidential election]” Burns said.

America political advertising landscape According to Statista, political advertising spending is expected to exceed record spending levels in 2024, at around $15 billion to $16 billion, especially considering the upcoming presidential election.

Collaboration between CTV and DOOH

As digital advertising options continue to expand, platforms are working closely with media agencies to navigate the walled garden of political ad spending this year. Mike Hauptman, founder and CEO of his AdLib Media Group, a programmatic media buying platform spun out of MediaMath, works with agencies and advertisers such as Population Science.

For DOOH in particular, Hauptmann explained, targeting and access has improved, allowing advertisers to make selections on a per-screen basis and even per intersection, such as a particular bus stop.

“There has been a dramatic shift in addressability and supply since the last election cycle,” he said. “Even if it’s working and he’s inserting a QR code there to measure the number of people who visit the campaign page or there’s some kind of vanity URL, it’s not effective and it’s not working. You can measure the area where… [so you can] Just like entering more budget on Facebook, your spending will automatically increase in real time. ”

Burns also said CTV allows customers to spend more nimbly and strategically. Despite billions of dollars in expected spending, many campaigns don’t have the budget to “basically throw it at the wall,” he explained.

“It’s really important to them [local] Campaigns (in fact, most campaigns out there are about agile spending) [and] They’re going to be targeted for spending,” Burns told Digiday. With microtargeting, “CTV can target exactly the people you want to reach. 90% of people are streaming some content.”

Kelly Rawlinson, director of client leadership at cloud, a full-service digital agency, said data shows that in competitive regions, video content through YouTube and CTV “typically accounts for the majority of digital media spend. I agree that it is.

“DOOH and CTV in general are becoming more and more popular, and with important elections around the corner, there is no reason they can’t be used at a high rate for political campaigns,” Rolinson added. “Real-time performance metrics show that digital media spending has a significant impact on election outcomes.”

It remains to be seen whether CTV or DOOH will do better in increasing their share of political ad spending. Burns believes both amounts could rise “significantly,” adding that “part of that is due to downstream effects that we don’t have control over in terms of funding by the political parties…although… , I expect and I think there will be a significant increase,” he added. We are already seeing results from some of the money spent during the primary season. ”

David Algranati, chief innovation officer at comScore, said recent CTV research shows that some rural areas in the U.S. actually have higher CTV viewership, with “higher index numbers than urban areas. But this seems counterintuitive…” Indexing and locating rural areas without taking these into account increases the likelihood of misallocation. ”

Brand safety measures

Rolinson said the trend also reflects the need for agencies to step up their brand safety measures during key political seasons. This is especially true in the case of intense news coverage or sensitive social issues following a debate or event.

“If a brand doesn’t want to appear in areas with a lot of political coverage, there are steps agencies can take to redirect spending to other channels that minimize political coverage,” Rolinson said. . “Apart from strict brand safety measures, we will be conducting real-time audits on emerging trends to enhance campaign keywords, targeting and blocklists.”

While some media agencies say they’ve seen minimal budget changes across channels so far, a big focus for clients this season is to “reduce spending on specific channels.” “It’s not going to be about avoidance or minimization, it’s about brand safety and suitability,” said Marcy Greenberger, chief investment officer. At U.M.

In particular, Greenberger said, “advertisers will seek to limit exposure and adjacency to certain content within a channel.” Some advertisers are risk-averse and want to avoid running ads related to political discussions.

CTV and DOOH tend to avoid news-related content (unless they’re streaming news services), so the outlets hope to get a bigger slice of the political advertising pie by the end of November.

https://digiday.com/?p=543358

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