You're Leaving Money on the Table
It's an election year. If you're reading this, it's likely you work at or run a local news site.
We have some good news. And, well, some bad news, too.
Good: It looks as though 2022 will be a barn burner of a year for political ad buying. Digital will - for the first time - enter billion dollar spend territory and stay there.
Also good: Facebook and Google who have historically taken the lion's share of that spend but are seen as less effective than they have been in the past. They no longer offer voter targeting which is cookie-based. And they're wary of upsetting lawmakers who are anxious to pass legislation restraining "Big Tech."
Here's the bad news: Google and Facebook dominated political campaigns in three big elections held last year. Here are some numbers taken from a search of Google’s political ad “library”.
In California, the successful effort to halt the recall of Governor Gavin Newsom spent at least $5 million Google ads.
In Virginia, Terry McAulliffe's campaign spent a similar amount of money on Google. More than $5 million. His successful opponent Gov. Glenn Younkin spent just about $2 million.
In New Jersey the story was similar. At least $1.5 million was spent by Gov. Patrick Murphy's winning effort, his opponent Jack Ciattarelli and various third party groups supporting these men.
So, all told, these three 'off-year' elections spent $9 million buying political ads for pennies instead of the dollars you'd charge.
And many have kept it up this year. Here's a chart for the past week from Democratic activist newsletter, FWIW.
These numbers are estimates provided by Google so they're not written-in-stone reliable but they are scary. Political ad buyers like programmatic ad buying because it's fast, it's cheap and they don't have to answer too many questions about what the ads say or whether they're complying with editorial standards or legal requirements.
Most political ad buyers listed on the chart above work outside your market; they don't know you or your sites. When they can't find you, they default to the easy, low-cost solution and spend millions.
What to do? Sign up for a demo of Spot-On's Pinpoint Precision ad buying platform. It connects your ad inventory to political ad buyers - the folks pushing millions into Facebook and Google - allows you to give them your political rate, makes sure they honor it AND review creative before it runs on your site.
We've invited a handful of customer to road test the platform this month. And we're bringing in publisher every day. Want in on the action? Drop us an email and we'll get you a no-strings free demo.
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