Madhive Research Shows How Political Advertisers Are Finding Success With Streaming
Candidates are leveraging streaming to go beyond zip codes and target potential voters by Congressional and Legislative districts
Madhive, the leading technology company engineered for modern TV advertising, today released research showing how political advertisers are finding success with streaming TV.
This year’s 2022 midterm elections are expected to exceed $8 billion in political ad spend, with Senate, House and other down-ballot races in play. An estimated 15% of that $8 billion is going to CTV, as candidates leverage streaming’s superior targeting abilities to connect with potential voters on a local level.
On traditional linear TV, buys can only be targeted by zip code. Unfortunately, Congressional and legislative districts rarely line up with zip code maps and depending on the boundaries of the district, candidates may wind up having to buy most of a city or metro area in order to reach all the voters in their district who live in that metro area..
Targeting on streaming, however, is much more precise as providers know the actual
location of the TV set. This allows for more cost-effective buying, while at the same time preventing the confusing overlap that happens when voters see ads for candidates who are not actually running in their district.
Madhive research shows how this plays out during the recent primary in New York’s 19th Congressional District, which encompasses all or part of 11 different counties, spanning three different DMAs: New York City, Albany, and Utica. Rather than putting all their money into linear, where they would have had to spend money across all three DMAs—including the very expensive New York DMA, campaigns utilizing streaming are able to limit their buys to households within the district, making those buys far more cost-effective.
With streaming, we can now get very specific with our targeting,” said Joe Marino, Managing Partner & Head of Client Success at Madhive. “We can look for Democratic-leaning swing voters, we can target Congressional districts from a geo perspective rather than from a zip code perspective. So essentially, it’s given us the ability to provide digital style hyper-targeting on television screens, which is something political campaigns were never able to access at scale before.”
The research and maps are included in analyst firm TVREV’s new report — How Streaming Is Changing Political Advertising — which dives deeper into how and why streaming is disrupting political advertising. Download the free report here.
