Ad Tech Firm Ampersand Launches New Political CTV Platform

Ad tech company Ampersand is launching a new platform that it says will bring political advertisers some certainty in the fast-growing – and increasingly fragmented – streaming environment. 

TrueStream Political will offer premium streaming inventory and voter insights across Comcast, Charter and Cox households, the company said. The idea is to give political advertisers more certainty around where their spots appear and how their dollars are being spent.

The platform is intended to solve what some political advertisers say is a persistent problem as a growing share of ad dollars move from linear television to CTV: fragmentation. While streaming offers advertisers more precision and flexibility, some political advertisers have complained that the shift to CTV has made it difficult to pin down returns on investment.

Because audiences are often scattered across multiple platforms, advertisers have struggled to track viewers across various apps and devices. Reaching those audiences has become increasingly expensive and complex, especially for political campaigns that operate on tight timelines and more-limited budgets.

Ampersand says that TrueStream Political will offer fraud-free, multiscreen inventory with deterministic, authenticated audience intelligence and verified voter reach at scale.

“Political advertisers are being forced to choose between scale and certainty, and that tradeoff is unacceptable,” Al Behmoiras, the vice president for political streaming at Ampersand, said in a statement. “TrueStream Political eliminates that compromise by delivering authenticated household-level reach, exceptional match fidelity, and the premium environments campaigns require. This is what political streaming should be.”

For decades, linear television provided advertisers with a stable – although somewhat imprecise – outlet with clearly defined buying paths and guaranteed reach. But its hold on the advertising market has begun weakening, as more Americans turn to streaming and multiple screens for news and entertainment. 

According to estimates from Cross Screen Media and AdImpact, CTV is expected to receive about $2.9 billion in spending during the 2026 midterm cycle. While that’s still less than the $5.3 billion that political advertisers are expected to drop on local broadcast television, it still marks a 16 percent increase over 2022 levels, when political advertisers dropped about $1.6 billion on streaming TV. 

Danny Jester, a partner at Democratic advertising agency GMMB, said that political advertisers are facing more pressure than ever to justify spending and prove to clients that they’re reaching the right audiences. 

“Building on the scale of traditional and addressable TV, innovative streaming solutions that bring greater precision, transparency and premium reach are becoming an essential addition to modern political media strategies,” Jester said.