Political Ads are Booming this Election Season

We’re getting closer and closer to what seems like a presidential election that will define our nation for the next couple of years, even decades.

People in America are still trying to learn how to live and survive through this pandemic.

We’re all healing from everything that’s happened between the start of COVID-19 up to today.

But between a collapsing economy and the 2020 election, we’ve seen a growing ad spending on political advertising.

The ad spending for the 2020 election could reach up to $6.7 billion, which is up by 12% from its initial projection, according to Cross Screen Media.

Political ads are bursting both on traditional media and digital media.

Ad spending on the broadcast is expected to increase from $2.53 billion (2018) to $3.56 billion (2020). However, on the side of digital, the projection is a growth of $1.82 billion (2020) from $.074 billion.

The Trump campaign has spent around $48 million on direct response ads. In comparison, the Biden campaign accounts for $16 million, according to Politico.

We’ve seen the growing number of political ads on social media. The same Cross Screen Media report has discovered $605 million from 13,000 advertisers on Facebook and Google.

But bear in mind, especially if you’re running ads on social media, that there are policies on social media when it comes to political ads.

Policies on misinformation

Social media platforms, like Twitter, TikTok, LinkedIn, and Pinterest, have banned political advertisements.

When it comes to political ads, Facebook and Google are the main platforms.

Looking ahead of the 2020 US U.S. presidential election last year, Facebook drew up a plan to fight its platform’s growing misinformation. This includes flagging content from state-sponsored media outlets and classifying news as “false information” reported by third-party fact-checkers.

On the other hand, Google chose to treat political ads, just like any other ads for any products or services.

While an anti-Biden ad that the Trump campaign launched last year has banned Facebook because it’s ridden with false accusations, the smear campaign still lives on YouTube, which is owned by Google.  

Policies on microtargeting

Social media allows microtargeting, and this makes it hard to discriminate between real news and fake news. Microtargeting is a strategy used by political parties that include direct marketing data mining methods.

This means that microtargeted ads run by either Republican or Democratic parties will or may go unnoticed.

But while there may be a harder time separating fake from real news, candidates can reel in on specific issues important to their voters.

Google allows political ads to target based on zip code, sex, age, and location. The platform lets contextual targeting, which means that a climate change ad will work best when it’s shown to a voter who’s watching or reading something about climate change.

Facebook gives its users more control over how many political ads they see on the platform.

Looking to create last-minute political campaign ads? Send us a message, and we’ll craft one for you or your candidate.