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As residents of Georgia, California, and Pennsylvania can probably attest, political advertisers spent a lot of their 2022 midterm digital budgets on video inventory, according to a report released by the ad platform Basis Technologies.
Breaking it down: Of the more than $130 million in political ad spend that flowed through the Basis Technologies platform in 2022, 68% was spent on video inventory, and 24% was spent on display inventory. Native ads and audio ads represented 3% and 1%, respectively. A quarter of those political advertising dollars were spent in the 10 days leading up to Election Day, Basis found.
Though Basis’s data represents only a sliver of total political ad spend, the percentages help shed light on a record-breaking election cycle where campaigns spent an estimated $8.9 billion, $119 million shy of the 2020 presidential election and nearly double the $3.9 billion spent during the 2018 midterms, according to the ad tracking firm Ad Impact.
Spending on CTV is growing: While video’s overall share “largely stayed the same” when compared to 2020, CTV ad spend grew from 19% of total budgets in 2020 to 30% in 2022, largely eating away at ads targeted to desktop users, according to the report. Programmatic CTV spend share grew an additional 60% between 2020 and 2022, Basis found. That isn’t entirely surprising: During the midterms,political media buyers told Marketing Brew that they expected CTV spend to grow by as much as five times.
“Clients were just clamoring for as much connected TV as they could get their hands on,” Grace Briscoe, SVP of client development at Basis Technologies, said.
Automate it: Additionally, a majority of advertisers bought their ads programmatically instead of through direct deals—although the amount of political ad dollars transacted programmatically fell unexpectedly from 63% in 2020 to 52% in 2022, according to the report. Briscoe credited the decline in part to a “perceived scarcity of inventory” than in previous election cycles, which prompted advertisers to spend more on direct buys to lock in inventory.
“There was more fear in the system about the scarcity of programmatic inventory and how much rates might increase,” she said, but “that fear was not realized.”
It’s good to be king: Though Meta and Google have cracked down on the targeting tools for political advertisers, they still command a decent chunk of ad spend, according to Briscoe—YouTube, Facebook, and Hulu each attract the most spend among political advertisers, which has been the case since Basis started tracking the data in 2018.