Connected TV (CTV) advertising is poised to have a breakout year in the 2024 U.S. political election cycle, with campaigns increasingly turning to the medium for its ability to provide targeted reach at scale.
While the first half of the year saw most CTV ad buys coming through direct deals, programmatic buying is now surging as a key strategy for many candidates in the run-up to November. That’s bringing both opportunities and challenges to the market.
“We’re seeing a tremendous amount of growth in CTV and the first half of the year it was mostly direct insertion orders, but now we’re seeing programmatic really start to take off,” says Eric Davis, Head of Independent & Political, Programmatic Demand, FreeWheel, in this video interview with Beet.TV. “It’s becoming a major strategy for a lot of the candidates.”
Finite Inventory Leads to Rising Prices
One key dynamic in the CTV ad market this election cycle is that, unlike other digital channels, CTV does not have an infinite supply of ad inventory. That’s leading to a supply squeeze and rising prices in some battleground states.
“The thing to remember with CTV is it’s not infinite. So there’s a finite amount of inventory,” Davis says. “What we’re starting to see is a lot of suppliers are starting to be sold out, especially in some of the battleground states.
”So pricing is starting to go up and there’s inventory compression, and we expect that to go up more dramatically throughout the cycle.”
Speed of Activation is Critical
Davis’ FreeWheel works with its Comcast stablemate Effectv to help deliver political programmatic advertising.
Another key factor for political campaigns advertising on CTV is the speed with which they can get creative up and running. In a fast-moving election cycle, the ability to deploy new creative within hours, not days, is critical.
“When they launch a CTV campaign, they need to be live within minutes and hours and not days and weeks,” Davis says. “The publishers that have a little more stringent creative approvals are not capturing as much of that demand because it takes longer for them to get live in market.”
Pricing Set to Rise Dramatically
As the election cycle heats up, CTV ad pricing is set to rise significantly, while inventory will get even tighter. That makes it imperative for political ad buyers to plan ahead to ensure they will be able to secure the inventory they need in key markets.
“Right now we’re recommending that buyers secure inventory in specific states if they absolutely need to run, because it’s going to be very, very challenging and the pricing is going to go up dramatically,” Davis says. “We’re trying to make sure they’re prepared to see the increase in pricing.”
You’re watching “Road to the Election 2024,” a Beet.TV Leadership Series, presented by Effectv. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.
