Digital consultants had, until recently, been lamenting their share of campaign budgets. But they now appear on track to get a bigger slice of the pie — particularly on down-ballot races.
AdImpact, which provides ad tracking to media companies, agencies and others, released a report Monday that modeled ad spending will top $9 billion in 2022.
“What is driving this explosive growth? The widespread use of Facebook as a fundraising tool has allowed campaigns to quickly and easily reach a highly polarized electorate. This, combined with the rise of easy online donation tools such as ActBlue and WinRed, has allowed candidates and issue groups to fundraise with greater ease than ever before,” the report states.
The authors note that “down-ballot spending has grown rapidly with expansion into the digital space.” To wit, down-ballot campaigns are projected to drop $2.51 billion on advertising — up from roughly $820 million in the previous midterm cycle in 2018.
In fact, down-ballot spending is expected to top both gubernatorials and Senate races, which are projected to spend some $2.33 billion and $2.38 billion respectively, although that projection for gubernatorials could increase if the recall of California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), set for Sept. 14, becomes more competitive.
For a peek into where the down-ballot ad budgets are going to go, AdImpact broke out the spending in Georgia for C&E.
With the national spotlight on races up and down the ticket in the state, down-ballot races here could provide a benchmark for others around the country. After all, Georgia races in 2022 are predicted to spend $551 million on advertising — only California ($592 million) and Florida ($593 million) will account for more in 2021-2022.
While broadcast ($21.9 million) remains the top ad category for down-ballot races in Georgia, as it does everywhere else, digital is the next biggest ($8.59 million), followed by cable ($5 million) and radio ($1.78 million) for a total of $37.3 million projected to be spent.
That means that digital could account for some 23 percent of total ad spending in down-ballot races in Georgia — an uptick over the roughly 20 percent slice of the pie that digital practitioners are used to getting.
But there’s no question that, overall, broadcast remains king of political media. Nationally, broadcast is expected to absorb $4.57 billion in 2022. While that’s down from the $5.34 billion spent in 2020, it’s up significantly from 2018, when $2.97 billion was budgeted for broadcast advertising.
Overall digital spending, meanwhile, is projected to total just under $1.30 billion. But its ads on connected televisions (CTV) that are blowing away AdImpact’s analysts. “This is the first time that we’re predicting the CTV environment will actually outpace, from a spend level, the digital environment, which is loosely defined as the Facebook-Google area,” John Link, a VP at AdImpact, told C&E.
Part of the reason for growth in CTV is simply because, at a certain spend level, broadcast becomes inefficient. “As the additional soft money groups come in — that drives the average cost for broadcast up,” said Link. Money then gravitates to cable, digital, radio, or to CTV, which has added targeting capabilities for things like GOTV.
“When you have additional funds in front of you, it allows you additional freedoms — you can start earlier than you would have in the past,” said Link. “You can hit higher-reach programs. You can extrapolate that money on different mediums that maybe weren’t as heavily utilized in the past.”
