LONDON– How will media buys change during the 2020 election? According to Ashley J. Swartz, CEO and founder of Furious Corp., the focus will shift back to what’s tried and true: television.
In an interview with Beet.TV, Swartz explained that digital, digital targeting and social media will continue to be important, but after a tumultuous 2016 experience, many dollars will go back to the medium that has been relied upon by political campaigns for decades.
“The reality is that in the final mile, people buy television,” says Swartz.
Digital platforms are reacting accordingly, too. Google and Twitter have already announced that they will not be taking on political advertising in 2020 and the world is waiting to see what Facebook will do. The social network has come under fire for letting misleading and false claims run in political advertisements on its site.
“Although historically we’ve seen cycle over cycle growth in those [social] platforms, I think we will see it slow or just sort of flat if not even decline this year,” says Swartz.
This means increased opportunity for television to be a game changer. According to Swartz, local TV is always the biggest winner because they can target geographically and can aggregate local inventory on a national scale. She says that advertisers are doubling down in preparation for the upcoming election in order to maximize their return and yield for the political cycle. Television will be a large part of their focus.
She defines local TV as both local stations and local cable systems run by national operators. She points to emerging local TV ad platform Ampersand, the joint venture of Comcast, Cox and Charter as one of key movers in 2020. Others in the advanced local TV mix include Comcast’s Effectv.
“I really think this is an opportunity for another resurgence or renaissance of television,” says Swartz. “Not only in that we will see an increase in aggregate dollars and spend for political and TV comparatively over the last election cycle, we will also see a great level of confidence and assuredness and trust, most importantly in television, that is not able to be achieved given what has transpired over the digital and social platforms over the last few years.”
This video was produced in London at the Future of TV Ads Global forum in December 2019. This series is sponsored by Finecast, the global addressable TV company that is part of WPP. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
