Practitioners on both sides woke up on November 6th with the same regret: They wished they’d spent more of their budgets on audio, whether podcast advertising or traditional radio.
Shannon Chatlos, a partner at GOP firm Strategic Partners & Media, LLC, said it’s the one regret she has from an otherwise successful cycle for her roster. “My one do-over would have been to put more money into podcasts, especially at the end,” Chatlos said Wednesday during C&E’s Postscript Conference in DC.
During advocacy efforts, Chatlos noted she regularly channels budget to audio advertising to help push legislation through or block bills from passing. “I should have used it more this election cycle,” she said.
Other practitioners shared the same regret, but noted podcast advertising should be thought of as a tool for reaching a niche audience. “Not everyone’s President Trump or [VP] Kamala Harris,” said Tom Newhouse, principal at Republican media shop Slash Strategy.
“It’s not a frequency game, it’s a reach game,” he said. Podcasts are “an incredible way to reach an audience that’s really difficult to reach otherwise.”
Democratic practitioners said they felt the same way, but added that their regret is also colored by the fact that it wasn’t even a hard sell to get campaign clients behind their audio buys.
“There’s enough of a knowledge of where the media consumption is moving across audio that campaigns are ready to do that,” said Brian Krebs, a SVP at Precision Strategies.
Expanding on his experience in 2024, Krebs said he regretted not getting up earlier on audio for his clients.
“I would have started earlier and done a little bit more of a slower burn on the programmatic audio side of things, and then identifying, maybe late, where some of those holes are on the demographic side.”
