Closing the Gap Between Political Data and TV Activation In Minutes, Not Days

How one platform is bringing household-level accuracy to political TV at campaign speed

Media buyers in 2026 will have to contend with challenges related to identity and geo-targeting: Namely, an expansion of digital privacy laws and, in some battleground states, hastily redrawn congressional districts. 

If that wasn’t hard enough, they’ll be navigating this terrain at speed while working to get their clients’ ads in front of target audiences. 

Blockgraph, the technology company focused on grounding TV advertising in the real world, believes it has the solution. It’s spent the last five years helping the TV industry to utilize their first-party data better and faster. Now, they’re building on that experience, enabling a direct path from political data to TV activation, with tools built specifically for how campaigns operate today. 

In an interview with C&E, Blockgraph CRO Aleck Schleider explains why they created this privacy-safe approach for budget-conscious political advertisers to reach the right audience in the right location at the optimum time.

C&E: Why build a tool specifically for political marketers? 

Aleck Schleider: We recognized that political ad spending is very data driven, especially as digital has been so successful for campaigns in recent cycles. TV needed to catch up and be as fast, as fluid and, ultimately, as simple as what’s been happening in the digital world for political. Agencies already know who they need to reach and where. The challenge has been getting that into TV quickly enough to act on it. That’s what we set out to solve.

C&E: Political agencies are increasingly under pressure to react quickly. TV has always been a high-impact channel, but not necessarily a responsive one. How does that tension show up?

Schleider: It shows up in execution. There are still too many steps between having the data and being live. In the past, it could have taken two-or-three days, sometimes a week, before a campaign or group’s data got from their agency to the media partner, who then had to update the target universe. 

Blockgraph removes that lag time. When a segment gets uploaded through our platform, it’s made available to media partners for activation within their systems, all in just a few minutes.

C&E: A matter of minutes? Tell us more about the timing. 

Schleider: That’s the speed. When the media buyer uploads that segment, they literally have a direct path to refresh that segment with our media partners. It’s a privacy-safe match between partners, so data stays protected while still being usable for targeting.

Now, our media partners in television may take up to 24-hours to turnaround an ad because of the processes on their end, but that’s still better than a week of waiting like in previous cycles.

C&E: There’s now a patchwork of data privacy laws across the United States, how does your platform ensure political advertisers’ compliance? 

Schleider: As a facilitator and not an owner of data, we built the necessary technology to enable media partners to apply opt-outs and so that they can operate on a state-by-state level, based on how each states’ law is defined. The same structure applies across advertisers and the data providers. 

C&E: You have a secondary focus with the new tools in your platform, and that’s geography. Tell us about that.

Schleider: Geography is important, especially given the fact that many of our partners — cable/ISP providers — are local in nature. So they have the ability to deliver local ads really well. And political advertising, especially this cycle, is very locally driven. So we built capabilities that let political advertisers choose where they want to reach voters in their desired target geographically, and ensure the right households are included.

There are several aspects to that. Clients can create custom segments based on electoral districts in our platform, or by city or state if needed. Additionally, political advertisers can utilize their own first-party segments or select from our political data partners like L2 Data, DataTrust, Tunnl, and others. And once redistricting happens, those data segments are updated accordingly. 

C&E: Was this to create more efficiency for your clients?  

Schleider: Efficiency matters — it’s the benefit of the capabilities we’ve built, so advertisers aren’t wasting valuable fundraising dollars. But equally important is reaching the right target audience to drive better outcomes.

The work we do with our media partners and their advertising customers is built on accuracy down to the household level. This enables targeting of addressable campaigns with confidence and efficiency, while also being cost effective. 

C&E: How will this enable clients to make better strategic decisions? 

Schleider: If accuracy and scale matter, especially when it comes to this political cycle, there’s no better, more valuable capabilities than what we provide along with our media partners. That’s one piece. The other piece is speed. We know there’s fluidity of ad budgets, and how quickly the dollars shift and move around, especially at the end of a cycle. We provide streamlined efficiency and speed.

C&E: One of the ongoing challenges in political TV is fragmentation across linear and streaming. Does this approach simplify that, or add another layer?

Schleider: It simplifies it. We sit in a unique position with our supply-side partners because they’re not just the cable and satellite video provider, they’re also, in most cases, the internet service or streaming provider.

Because they’re the digital and linear pipeline into those homes, audiences can be delivered across all TV environments with precision and speed.

C&E: Looking ahead to the midterms, what’s the practical takeaway for agencies?

Schleider: Execution speed is becoming a differentiator. With Blockgraph OnDemand, agencies can sign up and be up and running within an hour, upload their data, focus on the right districts, and get live without delay — giving them a clear advantage when timing matters most.