Political advertising is projected to boom with this year’s U.S. elections, passing $16B in total spend. While roughly 70% of the spend is expected on TV and traditional channels, digital media spend is growing fastest.

In this post, we look at what digital agencies, publishers, and tech platforms can learn from past election cycles. We also provide a new playbook for providing value that goes above and beyond the ‘standard’ digital approach (i.e. buying ads on Facebook and YouTube).

Part 1: What History Has Taught Us

The presidential election of 2016 can be remembered as the first election to be decided, at least in part, by social media. While the Clinton campaign spent $28M on Facebook ads, the Trump campaign famously spent 50% more, focusing on micro-targeting and personalized messaging to win over swing voters.

Social media proved it has a unique ability to influence voters. Social media weaves together three critical factors that are critical to the people who control campaign purse strings:

• Audience reach: audiences are on social, and have been highly targetable
• Effective formats: social formats continue to drive strong audience reactions
• Emotion through video: social formats allow political advertisers to deliver sight, sound and motion, which is what they’ve seen work so well historically with TV advertising.

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Part  2: What’s Different This Time Around? 

With increased public scrutiny on the content that social platforms distribute, most of the big platforms are clamping down on political advertising. Facebook and Google both have pulled back on the level of political targeting they allow. Facebook enforces a freeze period in which political ads can no longer be updated, limiting the ability to optimize ads and drive outcomes.

TikTok is even more complicated. TikTok seems the perfect fit for political advertisers: it reaches younger audiences, who make up a large section of the swing voters. 

But there’s one problem: TikTok bans all political advertising.

Net-net: in 2024, we’ve got proof that social media formats are extremely effective. But targeting users on social media is getting increasingly difficult. With all the flip-flopping the social platforms are doing on their policies around political messaging, it’s going to be difficult to keep campaigns live, and even more difficult to rely on them for new campaigns as budgets open up.

As with everything, sweeping challenges create opportunities for those who take a different approach. Let’s look at what a better approach can look like.

Part 3: How to Take Advantage of Trends in 2024

At Nova, we’ve been focusing on five tactics with political advertising heading into this year:

learn more about how Nova can help you do more this political season and win more political campaigns, contact us at support@createwithnova.com