Election Briefing: Time is Money and Attention is Scarce. Why Media Buyers Say Chasing Every Screen Won’t Win in 2026 

As audiences splinter across streaming platforms, YouTube, podcasts and social, two leading media buyers told Campaigns & Elections the approach in 2026 isn’t chasing every screen. Rather then being everywhere at once between now and November, they said, it’s about following your voter audience to where it reliably shows up. 

That discipline has a name, according to John Paul Padua, vice president of media buying at Trilogy Interactive, who has spent more than a decade buying for Democratic campaigns. He calls it “reliable reach.”

“Sure, you can have a podcast, but it only reaches maybe 20,000 or 30,000 people reliably per download,” Padua said during an online discussion on advertising and buying, part of C&E’s 2026 Election Briefing Series. “At the same time, I have [an option on] YouTube over here that’s going to reach half the state … Time is money, it’s the attention economy. So we just need to make sure that we are lining up our buys with where time is spent.”  

Right now, that time points in a clear direction, according to Padua: “The biggest winners right now, as of 2026, are YouTube and OTT.”  

Eric Harpootian, vice president at Strategic Media Services, a Republican media planning agency, said YouTube is unavoidable on his plans, too, precisely because it comes the closest to replicating the broad reach buyers traditionally got only from broadcast. 

“It’s definitely rare we put out a plan that doesn’t have YouTube,” Harpootian said. “It kind of emulates that broadcast TV reach, especially when you back into CTV screens. You’re getting that full attention because people are watching it on the glass.”

If fragmentation is pushing buyers toward reach, it’s also reopening an old debate about targeting. As voter files get layered with ever more predictive data, Padua argued, campaigns risk over-engineering their buys. 

“Campaigns need to ask a serious question of what is the value of reach versus what is the value of targeting,” Padua said. “There have been some instances and some tests that we’ve run where it’s just better to get the reach and you just don’t want to target yourself into a corner.”

The scramble for reach still runs into a metrics problem at the moment: on streaming and connected TV, there’s the job of understanding who is watching and where. Oftentimes the audience data campaigns are relying on leans on surveys where viewing habits are self-reported, and that remains shaky ground, said Padua. 

“You’re relying on your audience member to be a reliable narrator of their own media habits, which is hit or miss,” he said. For example, someone watching a local news channel on Samsung TV Plus reports that they get their news from local broadcast TV.

“I don’t think people understand 100 percent what they’re watching sometimes, and where they’re watching it,” Padua said. 

Automated content recognition and viewing data pulled from the TVs themselves, or other third-party measurement, can get buyers more reliable data. But “those data pieces are expensive,” Padua said, leaving campaigns to weigh “what is the data that you can afford” against what they can generate themselves and what viewers self-report.

Harpootian noted one way his team works to close that gap is with search lift studies. “We can actually see, specifically on Google, they get served an ad and within the next hour, are they Googling some sort of keyword that could match to our ad or our candidate or our cause?” he said. “There’s a lot of data on that back end to help us get the full picture.”    

Looming over all of this cycle’s media decisions is the Supreme Court’s recent decision in NRSC v. FEC, which allows party committees to coordinate spending directly with campaigns. It’s a decision that will reshape where the money flows, though both panelists cautioned it’s too early to know exactly how it will impact the buying equation.

“We’re literally at the starting line,” Padua said. “I don’t know how much this turns into another Citizens United moment, but I think we’re in inning one of this game here.”

One of his concerns is that it could result in overspending on traditional media: “I’m worried people will just go back to their old habits and try to buy a thousand points of broadcast and call it done.”