This is a campaign cycle where the environment is the most uncertain it’s been in a generation. The top of the ticket for both major parties is unsettled — although perhaps more so for Democrats — which is creating a host of strategic calculations that need to get run by both parties’ strategists.
But practitioners fretting about a presidential switcheroo can breath a little easier knowing at least there’s one area where they can find consistency from now until November: the programmatic advertising environment.
“We are living in a much more mature and stable digital ad delivery ecosystem and market,” said Ryan Meerstein, a managing partner, at GOP mega firm Targeted Victory. “When we first started moving onto DSPs in 2011-12, it was a complete Wild West.
“We wanted to be innovators and we wanted to deliver against first-party data, and we wanted to do all those things, but the market was incredibly immature. There was lots of fraud. There was not a ton of premium content yet brought into those platforms.”
Meerstein called 2024 “a completely different world.”
“I think marketers are so much more comfortable with that digital delivery space [and] that is actually kind of … why we’re seeing marketers so much more willing to continue to move into OTT streaming in general.”
He went on to describe what’s giving political marketers some assurances that while they may not know what creative they’re going to run this summer, at least they know it can get delivered effectively.
“We now have an ecosystem where we can actually bring premium inventory into DSPs and have all of the guardrails in place to ensure that we’re delivering to the audiences that we want to, and that we’re delivering it in a user experience that we want,” said Meerstein. “In real time, we can actually monitor things and have access to dashboards.
“If we believe that user experience is not occurring on certain sites, we can blacklist those sites in real time.”
