For all the talk of evolution and maturity in the CTV/OTT space, there’s still a big pain point for political marketers: the approvals process.
Going back a couple cycles now, media buyers have been wringing their hands about everything from inconsistent file requirements to how different publishers defined contrast advertising.
This despite steady growth in campaign spending in the vertical. To wit, this cycle is expected to see CTV grow its share of political ad spending to just over 13 percent of the total outlay — pulling in roughly $1.2 billion in combined spending by campaigns and groups, according to an estimate by forecaster AdImpact.
Despite this growth, political ad buyers say they’re still contending with the old Wild West culture of digital media.
“The digital ecosystem has always been very fractured and less mature,” said Adam Meldrum, founder of the media-buying operation AdVictory LLC. “And everybody makes their own decisions. It’s a real challenge to navigate and it’d be great if eventually we could establish some level of uniformity in this.”
Some of the lack of uniformity can be seen in a contrast with other verticals. For instance, Amanda Malo, president of Bask Digital Media, said that in some cases she’s had to abandon a planned buy with a publisher because of the approvals process that differs dramatically from, say, a broadcast TV station.
“We’ve 100 percent run into situations where the ad is running on TV and we can still get it up with other OTT vendors,” Malo said. “Sometimes we just can’t get it up with that same exact vendor that it’s running with on TV [or] the approval process takes so long that the ad is switched by the time that we even hear back from the OTT vendor.
“Like it doesn’t even matter if they approve that ad because we need to switch out and re-traffic a new ad anyway.”
She added: “Time is of the essence with these campaigns and if they can’t get the ad buy [up], we have to take that budget and move to somewhere else.”
Meldrum said that, unfortunately, making that move is not always in the best interests of the clients. And in those circumstances, you’ve just got to work with the publisher’s staff to get the ad up.
“Those are tough decisions,” he said. “If running media somewhere [else isn’t] in the best interest of the client and their strategy goals, I think you got to find a way to work around it.”
He added: “But at the end of the day, as timelines get tight and budgets get tight, it’s [often] just as easy just to pick up and go somewhere else rather than deal with that back and forth in certain places. And we are doing that where we can.”
