Political advertising spending has already hit a record $6.7 billion, according to estimates from Advertising Analytics, with just a few weeks to go before Election Day. A vast percentage of that spending has gone to local TV stations and local cable — $4.1 billion for local broadcast stations and $1 billion to local cable TV platforms. Just $247 million has been spent on national broadcast and cable TV networks.
Record levels of money have poured into Maine’s competitive race between U.S. Sen. Susan Collins and House Speaker Sara Gideon, shaking up the TV market for candidates and non-candidates and raising questions about how it can all be spent effectively by Election Day. But that accounts for only a fraction of the ad spending in Maine this year. The Portland-Auburn TV market alone has seen $89 million in political ad spending this year, according to Advertising Analytics, more than massive markets like Dallas and Chicago.
A prominent pro-Trump super PAC is launching another $1 million ad blitz in Arizona amid polls showing President Trump trailing Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden in the state. The Committee to Defend the President will run two ads on cable news and local broadcasts as part of the buy. The group is also spending $100,000 for a digital outreach effort.
Adding up money shelled out for the presidential contest, the congressional and gubernatorial races and from third-party groups advocating for candidates and causes, political advertisers in the U.S. spent at least $264 million on Facebook in the third quarter, according to CNBC’s compilation of data from the Center for Responsive Politics and Facebook’s ad library.
For Sept. 24 through Oct. 7, Biden placed 2,621 airings of commercials on national and regional TV (an estimated $21.7 million) with Trump at 946 airings ($6.5 million), according to iSpot.tv. Biden produced more than double the TV impressions, at 2.0 billion, versus 862.9 million for Trump.
Exclusives
Facebook announced significant changes to its advertising and misinformation policies, saying it will stop running political ads in the United States after polls close on Nov. 3 for an undetermined period of time. The changes, announced on Wednesday, come in an effort to “protect the integrity” of the upcoming election “by fighting foreign interference, misinformation and voter suppression”, the company said in a blogpost.
New political election spending projections for 2020 now hit $10.8 billion, according to an estimate from the Center for Responsive Politics — 50% higher than the 2016 presidential election period. The 50% increase over the $6.5 billion total in 2016 would be another political advertising election record, according to the group.
Local Washington D.C. affiliates of Fox, CNN and MSNBC have all banned new spots by Mischief @ No Fixed Address for nonprofit RepresentUS that feature AI overlays — known as deepfake technology — of North Korea’s Kim Jong-Un and Russia’s Vladimir Putin respectively, speaking about the fragility of the U.S. democracy. “Dictators” was set to air after the 2020 presidential debates. The spots had been approved but were pulled at the 11th hour with no explanation, according to the agency.
With many TV networks reportedly sold out or near sold out of advertising time in pre- and post-programming around the upcoming Presidential debates, TV advertising revenues among the top TV networks are expected to exceed the total $16 million mark set four years ago. The top six broadcast and cable TV networks — ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News Channel and MSNBC — pulled in a collective $15.5 million in national TV advertising revenues for the three Presidential debates, according to iSpot.tv — yielding more than 410 million impressions.
The top Democratic super PAC backing Joe Biden’s presidential campaign is using a seven-figure cash injection from billionaire Michael Bloomberg to launch a new advertising blitz in Florida. Priorities USA announced on Thursday that it would use the $5.4 million donation from Bloomberg to buy a week of air time across Florida’s 10 media markets beginning Friday.
Over the past few weeks, many in the Democratic Party had publicly called out former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg for his lack of financial commitment to help Joe Biden beat President Donald Trump in November. Bloomberg had vowed to open up his personal fortune to help defeat Trump but his lack of financial contributions since he dropped out of the Democratic primary in March had raised eyebrows among Democrats. Now Bloomberg is finally making good on his commitment and has decided he will focus his efforts on the key state of Florida, vowing to spend at least $100 million to help Biden win the Sunshine State.
Fearing a coming cash crunch, President Trump’s campaign has pulled back from television advertising over the last month, ceding to Democratic nominee Joe Biden a huge advantage in key states and sparking disagreements over strategy within the president’s senior team. Republican officials have been inundated with calls from worried activists and donors who complain about constant Biden ads in their local media markets, with very few paid Trump responses, according to people familiar with the conversations.
Fox Corp. CEO Lachlan Murdoch says the cable network is enjoying a thriving advertising market amid the U.S. presidential campaign. “You’ll see this Sunday, the Biden campaign spending quite substantially,” Murdoch reported.
Election season is on track to bring in record political advertising spending, with big broadcast TV station groups, such as Nexstar, Gray and Tegna, among the key beneficiaries, according to an analyst report. Guggenheim Securities analyst Curry Baker on Wednesday forecast “a record political cycle in 2020 with total political advertising expected to exceed $10 billion.” He mentioned ad prognosticator GroupM’s forecast along those lines, which compares with the $8.7 billion recorded during the 2018 mid-term elections.
The social network said it would block new political ads in late October, among other measures, to reduce misinformation and interference.
President Trump’s reelection campaign and the Republican National Committee have spent more than $1 billion combined since the beginning of 2017, according to Federal Election Commission filings. Most of that spending — nearly $625 million — was spent since the beginning of the 2020 election cycle in 2019. By comparison, at this point in the 2012 election cycle, former President Obama’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee had spent about $481 million.
Joe Biden’s presidential campaign is asking several TV stations in Pennsylvania to stop airing an ad from a pro-Trump Super PAC that the campaign says inacurately represents Biden’s position on fracking.
TVN Focus On Advertising | Surging Political Revenues Are TV’s Gain
Executives are pointing to a record-breaking year for political advertising as COVID-19 pushes TV into a more important role and the number of purple-shifting competitive states expands.
A backlash against political ads highlights challenges around targeting, frequency capping and fraud.
TVN Executive Session | Fox’s Jack Abernethy: TV Leadership Has ‘Never Been Tested’ Like Now
Political is bolstering a comeback for TV advertising, but as COVID-19’s uncertainties continue to loom, Fox Television Stations CEO Jack Abernethy says managing in a climate of fear continues to be challenging.
Biden is reserving airtime in 15 states, which includes a number of traditional swing states — Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Florida — as well as a number of historically Republican states, including Arizona, Georgia and Texas, and a few traditional swing states that seemed to be moving away from Democrats in recent years, such as Ohio and Iowa. His campaign says a “significant portion” of the reservation will be minute-long ads.
Political Ads Booming For Fox O&Os
Political is pacing more than 50% ahead of the equivalent period four years ago CEO Lachlan Murdoch tells analysts. Apart from political, COO John Nallen said it is “remarkable to see how quickly local advertising is coming back.”
The media offensive slamming Joe Biden comes after the president’s campaign went dark on television airwaves last week amid a reevaluation of advertising strategy.
President Donald Trump’s campaign has canceled a series of advertisement buys over the next few days as they review their messaging strategy, a senior campaign official told CNN. The decision comes after the campaign demoted former campaign manager Brad Parscale and elevated current campaign manager Bill Stepien. The move to promote Stepien and demote Parscale took place on July 15, a little more than two weeks ago.
The president has started spending more money on ads in much smaller Electoral College prizes like Iowa and Nevada, and in recent days his campaign stopped buying ads in Michigan entirely. The president faces several troubles in Michigan, including reduced support among less educated white voters and motivated Black voters in the state’s cities.
Facebook executives are considering a temporary ban on political advertising in the final days before the U.S. election in November as the company continues to grapple with a large advertising boycott, employee unrest and other issues related to its policies on hate speech and misinformation, according to two people familiar with the company’s thinking.
President Trump’s re-election campaign is advertising in three states he easily won in 2016, as well as two others that appear tougher for him to capture, as polls suggest he faces a narrower path to the White House than four years ago.
In the biggest, most dramatic outlay on political advertising in the 2020 presidential election cycle since the free-spending Mike Bloomberg and Tom Steyer primary-season glory days, President Donald Trump’s campaign just dropped $99.7 million on TV advertising across Florida, Ohio, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Arizona.
The Priorities USA super PAC has been given a judicial OK to join a legal battle between Trump’s financially flush Republican reelection campaign and WJFW Wausau-Rhinelander, Wis. (DMA 134), which is being sued for airing a Priorities USA ad.
The $15 million advertising effort will target six fall battlegrounds, all states that President Trump carried in 2016.
The change lets Facebook play both sides of the debate about political advertising on social media.
When it comes to the advertising tally for the U.S. presidential election so far, a good rule of thumb is: Nothing is as it seems. As election season enters full swing, there’s more to the numbers than meets the eye.
With their boss growing increasingly agitated with the state of his re-election campaign and with the efforts of Republican critics to undermine it, President Donald Trump’s team hatched a plan. They’d run a series of hard-hitting ads and place them on networks that they knew the president and congressional Republicans would watch. And so, over the past month, the Trump campaign has spent slightly more than $400,000 on cable news ads in the Washington, D.C., area, buying time largely on Fox News but with some smaller buys on CNN and MSNBC as well, according to filings with the FCC.
Priorities USA Action, a major Democratic super PAC, is out in Arizona and other states with new TV and digital ads attacking President Donald Trump — totaling $4 million in spending.
The U.S. economy is in free fall due to the coronavirus pandemic, but political advertising is expected to reach new heights because of it. A new, joint report from the ad tracking firm Advertising Analytics and analytics company Cross Screen Media projects that the total ad spending on the 2020 election cycle will reach $6.7 billion, up 12 percent over their initial $6 billion projection for the cycle. The new projection is a result, in part, of “the lack of face-to-face campaigning driving higher shares of budgets to paid media.”
How Biden Can Beat Trump From His Basement
Lis Smith: If he can win the battle for our screens, he can benefit from the death of the traditional presidential campaign. Democrats should use the media to highlight Biden’s empathy and position him as the presidential warm blanket that a scarred America will need.
