In 2024’s Political Ad Climate, CTV is the Platform To Watch

For most Americans, election years are synonymous with an absolute deluge of ads: commercials for every candidate in the state playing on a loop across every TV channel, billboards and lawn signs scattered around town, and pithy jingles on the radio.

And while some things never change — the U.S. political ad market in and of itself will be the 10th largest singular ad market in the entire world this year, larger than the entire advertising market in Australia — the way that money is spent is changing fast.

In 2024, political ad spend on digital platforms is set to climb a staggering 156% compared to 2020, a year that already seemed to be “extremely online.” Political content is no longer only inescapable in the traditional media world. It’s now omnipresent online, including in some unexpected places: Both parties are major presences on Facebook, Google (including YouTube), and X, but the Harris-Walz campaign made a splash by ‘sponsoring’ the Charli XCX Essentials playlist on Spotify.

One platform in particular stands out for its rapid growth in this election cycle: Connected TV.

It isn’t difficult to see why the digital market appeals to political campaigns: with the majority of ad spend happening in just 7 key states (PA, MI, AZ, GA, WI, NC, and NV), the precise targeting that digital sources provide can reach key demographics who may not be accessible by traditional means, like many Gen Z voters. And programmatic buying — which many CTV streamers offer — allows campaigns flexibility in their messaging which is incredibly important in our blink-and-you’ll-miss-something-major political environment.

That’s not all. Local down-ballot races and ballot initiatives are also making up an increasingly large portion of the ad budget pie — expected to take up 75% of all political ad spend this cycle — and digital platforms can allow for hyper-local targeting that traditional media can’t compete with.

Traditional TV media markets, after all, can end up showing ads for candidates to audiences ineligible to vote for them. The Philadelphia media market, for example, is one of the hottest for political ad spend because of its location in a highly competitive swing state – but linear TV ad buys there also reach hundreds of thousands of people who live in New Jersey and Delaware. In other words, a lot of people are getting a ton of exposure to the candidates in the Pennsylvania Senate race who don’t live or vote in Pennsylvania, and campaigns are paying for those eyeballs.

But on CTV, advertisers can utilize vast data networks to find otherwise difficult-to-pinpoint undecided voters, based on behavioral and demographic identifiers. What does this look like? Here’s an example.

Jane Doe is a 45-year-old white woman living in the Philadelphia suburbs. She is a teacher.

Her commute to work every day — down a main road traveled by many other middle-class white Pennsylvanians in the area — is lined with DOOH billboards specifically tailored with content to appeal to Jane and the issues she cares about.

At work, during her lunch break she listens to her favorite podcast and learns about a local ballot initiative served to her as an audio ad mid-episode based on her location.

When she gets home, she turns on her favorite ad-supported streaming service on CTV and watches the new show all her colleagues have been talking about, which is sprinkled with ads for candidates from the top of the ticket all the way down, alongside QR codes she can scan to learn more about the ones that really catch her eye.

A survey conducted after the 2022 primaries indicated that “…51% of frequent voter households reached by streaming were incremental to traditional TV and would not have been reached by TV alone” according to TV Tech. That number only continues to grow as more voters like Jane make the switch from traditional cable to streaming.

While the entire digital political ad environment is growing, nothing is exploding as much as CTV streaming. Projected spend on CTV ads is expected to climb more than 500% from just 4 years ago, taking up around half of the political sector’s entire projected digital ad spend.

In many ways, CTV offers a best-of-both-worlds experience that combines the power of traditional TV advertising with digital capabilities.

Voters are increasingly distrustful of social media platforms, with 3 out of every 4 Americans not believing that these platforms can be trusted to make unbiased content-moderation decisions. But this skepticism doesn’t seem to extend to CTV and streaming. While the targeting and interactivity capabilities of CTV are exclusively-digital perks, the user’s experience — and thus trust in the content — is similar to that of traditional TV. CTV content is protected by stronger content moderation and fixed programming schedules that reassure users that they’re not being misled with disinformation.

So what does all this mean? Well, we don’t quite know yet. We’re still in the middle of this transition and digital platforms continue to innovate and offer new game-changing tools to take political advertising to the next level. For example, at Infillion, we can use an API integration to place an email signup box directly in the ad experience itself, cutting out multiple clicks in the campaign’s efforts to connect with voters. With the speed at which these new tools and strategies are developing, we’re looking at a completely different ad environment in 2026, 2028, and beyond.

Only time will tell the true impact of this year’s historic political investment in digital advertising. But for better or for worse, a new era of political advertising has fully arrived, and increasingly specific targeting and data-driven programmatic buying are a necessity for political success in 2024.

Want to learn about how Infillion’s unique first-party data can help elevate your CTV strategy? Reach out today.