5 Things Political Advertisers Should Be Doing In 2025 and Beyond

In April, only a few months after Wisconsin sent President Trump back to the White House, Democrats won a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court with Susan Crawford, defying Elon Musk after he spent millions of dollars to oppose her. So much has happened in the first quarter of 2025 that it’s easy to forget the lessons for political marketers from the last cycle. That would be a mistake because of how much the 2024 presidential campaign will inform advertising strategy going forward – for political and non-political advertisers alike.

Formed over decades, conventional wisdom in politics suggests that a winning campaign requires massive fundraising efforts early in the cycle followed by a massive spend on TV advertising in the final months going into Election Day. Maximizing ad spend with frequency in the final days of a campaign has been the path to victory, with an unspoken rule: leave nothing in the bank on Election Day. Like a recurring version of Brewster’s Millions – blow your stockpile of cash to win your seat of power. There’s nothing worse than losing an election by a narrow margin and having some money left over – an outcome that would forever be remembered as the campaign that blew its chance of winning. 

The 2024 election cycle revealed a different playbook that broke this mold: the campaign with less money actually won. We have now entered the podcast era for politics, or more precisely: earned media can be the X factor to supercharge the campaign.

Mired in legal battles early on, Trump had a dramatic fundraising disadvantage from the start of the campaign. As result, he was being outspent on TV and other platforms by both President Biden and then-VP Harris. While Biden was struggling in the polls following a disastrous defeat in the first debate, Harris seemed to rescue the Democratic ticket during the fanfare of their late summer convention and was buoyed by a massive spend on the most coveted ad exposure of the year: the 2024 Olympics on NBC. She had a 50% advantage in funds, and her paid media exposure was dominant all the way through Election Day.

Trump’s campaign demonstrated that strategic planning and targeting can drive outsized returns in both cost efficiency and electoral outcomes. He diversified spend across platforms and generated tremendous reach with earned media, allowing him to overcome the funding gap and chart his path to victory. 

As political campaigns look to the future, here are five key lessons from this election that will factor into the future playbook. 

1. Precision trumps reach and repetition

The 2024 presidential election would always hinge on a small number of states and counties. According to OpenSecrets, Harris and Biden had at times more than 2x in media budget versus Trump, and their operation executed some of the biggest media buys in history, with incredible national reach and awareness. 

In response, Trump became more laser-focused on swing states in order to stretch his more limited budgets. According to Samba TV’s proprietary viewership data, Trump’s TV ads reached 64M U.S. households at an average frequency of 29 impressions per household. 

By comparison, Biden/Harris’ TV ads reached more households—76 million—and at a higher frequency of 46 impressions per household. By traditional media and electoral math, this should have translated into a Harris victory. 

Although Harris had more resources, she only reached 19% more households than Trump, per Samba TV estimates. As a result, her advertising was repeatedly reaching the same viewers, leading to tremendous waste and inevitably causing ad fatigue due to overexposure. Samba analyses have shown diminishing returns after 10 exposures to the same ad campaign – for both political and non-political advertising. Consumers actually start to turn against the message if the frequency gets too high. 

We saw the same counter-trend in this week’s state Supreme Court election in Wisconsin. Yet again, money didn’t rule the day. Crawford won, despite less money being spent on her candidacy than that of Brad Schimel ($45 million vs. $53 million in campaign and outside spending according to the Brennan Center for Justice). Electoral success in 2025 will continue to be about more than how much you spend. 

2. Strategic channel selection matters

The TV landscape is heavily fragmented. Choosing which channels to focus on deeply influences exposure. All linear channels combined can reach about 60% of the general population today, with the balance only reachable across a great variety of services, some of which don’t even have advertising available (eg, Netflix’s ad-free tier or YouTube Premium).

Trump’s campaign demonstrated that a strategically focused approach to TV ads can be a far more effective strategy. For example, Trump prioritized Fox News as their #2 network by impression volume—the only major network where Trump outspent Harris. 

With Fox News, Trump addressed his base of support that would contribute funds to his campaign, subscribe to receive campaign email and text messages, and ultimately be reminded to show up and vote. Similarly, NEWSMAX was also in Trump’s Top 10, but nowhere in Harris’ Top 20. Trump played to his base and motivated them well. These are the ones who showed up in November but didn’t show up this month in Wisconsin.

Harris made the same mistake last year. She seemed to cede conservative voters and chose a broader media strategy and failed to invest in some more traditional Democratic audiences that defected to Trump. She saturated lifestyle and entertainment networks such as HGTV, Food Network and Comedy Central. 

Trump’s strategic choices for media investment aligned well with viewership throughout the election cycle and on election night, when Fox News became the most-watched network for election coverage with 9.8M households tuning in (compared to 7.4M for CNN and 5.8M for MSNBC).

3. Multicultural targeting drives results

Trump didn’t just stick with his traditional base from previous elections. Trump targeted and effectively won the interest of a diverse audience of voters, including Black and Hispanic men, who have been underrepresented in past cycles for Republican candidates. 

The Trump campaign identified the opportunity to make significant gains among Hispanic and Black voters, making a bold bet to invest more heavily to advertise on Spanish-language networks. Harris focused elsewhere, likely on the assumption that her base wouldn’t defect from the Democratic coalition given Trump’s strong position on immigration. 

Trump prioritized Univision and Telemundo higher than Harris. Univision ranked #13 based on ad impressions for Trump, compared to #17 for Harris. Similarly, Telemundo ranked #17 for Trump, but wasn’t in Harris’s top 20 outlets according to our data. The investment paid off. Trump drove a 13% increase in votes with Hispanic voters compared to the 2020 election. Overall, Trump won 47% of the Hispanic male vote.

Trump also strategically invested in networks with a higher concentration of Black viewers, including the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN), which was in Trump’s Top 20, but not Harris’. While it’s difficult to draw a direct correlation, the result of Trump’s outreach to Black voters is clear: Trump doubled his standing with Black men from four years previous.

4. Earned digital and podcasts outperformed a TV-heavy strategy

In addition to Trump’s more efficient TV strategy, his campaign more effectively managed earned media, influencers, podcasts, text messaging and social media. This diversified approach leveraged the lower cost reach of these channels, and allowed for tailored messaging to specific voter segments. It also played to Trump’s ability to generate headlines on a variety of issues through purposefully incendiary comments, resulting in massive awareness at little cost. 

Trump’s strategy was particularly effective with podcasts, which became such a factor that the election could justifiably be called the Podcast Election. Media research shows that podcasts typically have higher attention levels than other media. Trump’s podcast appearances reached an average of 23.5 million listeners per week, 4x higher than Harris. And, according to analysis from Oxford Road and Veritone One, the specific podcasts Trump appeared had 2-3x higher ad engagement  than those Harris appeared on. Therefore, the total reach and engagement impact of Trump’s podcast appearances was 8-10x higher than Harris.  

On podcasts such as Joe Rogan’s, Theo Von’s and Valuetainment, Trump thrived in the less packaged format, and his candid and combative style built a strong rapport with Gen Z and Millennials who favor authenticity. The Trump investment in podcasts extended beyond interviews. For example, Trump’s partnership with the NELK Boys featured a podcast interview, plus Trump ads and organic posts on their social channels and appearances by members of the group on stage at rallies. In total, Trump aligned with young men who may have been politically disengaged but were devoted followers of these influencers. 

This was a stark contrast from Harris’s more scripted performance on Call Her Daddy, which ended up with only a fraction of Trump’s podcast reach. Harris’ podcast strategy was more narrow, with appearances on fewer, less-engaging podcasts. This mirrored her broader peanut-butter media strategy, reaching more general, purple audiences across platforms and geographies, but not making a convincing pitch across any of them.

In other words, Trump reached a hyper-engaged platform and combined it with his signature, direct, firebrand approach, and took it all the way to the ballot box. The next election cycle will be won or lost on the foundation of a cross-platform strategy that efficiently reaches critical segments of the population authentically and efficiently, with podcasts continuing to play an outsize influence as a hyper-engaged expression of this trend. 

5. Sophisticated geo-targeting beats broad coverage

While Harris ads reached over 70% of households in each swing state, Trump’s campaign only crossed that threshold in Wisconsin. Yet despite this coverage disadvantage, Trump secured victories in all seven swing states, increasing margins in every one from both 2016 and 2020. The Trump campaign used a diverse set of precise targeting tactics to connect with voters in specific DMAs, whereas Harris’s broader coverage likely wasted impressions on already-decided voters, highlighting the importance of using granular data for targeting and planning.

The 2024 election offers a powerful lesson for future political advertisers who grew up trusting in a high volume of TV advertising as the centerpiece to their strategy. Targeting key voter segments via earned media, paid digital, CTV and social will be essential going into the next election cycle, as viewers who have shifted away from linear TV—such as Gen Z, who eschew traditional media, and higher income earners who are exposed to fewer ads—are likely to miss traditional impressions. 

Ashwin Navin is the Co-founder and CEO of Samba TV, the global leader in AI technology for media analytics, including providing audience data and omniscreen measurement.