By: Will Bolles

Now that the holiday season is officially over, it’s time to talk about the one thing you did your best to avoid while spending time with family: POLITICS!

The 2020 U.S. elections were both historic and challenging. We saw record turnouts both at the polls and via mail in ballots, which led to candidates and advocacy groups spending billions of dollars on marketing. Then, right as the election cycle was heating up, numerous ad platforms (including Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Spotify, Adobe, and more) changed their political advertising policies, restricting or even banning the ads altogether.

Enter programmatic advertising. This became a critical component of a successful political campaign strategy, ultimately changing the way we navigate this space from both a sales and operations standpoint. A remarkable 25% of 2020 political ad spent on Basis DSP came during the last 10 days of the election cycle, resulting in over 650MM programmatic ad impressions served over this time. Programmatic was the most popular buying tactic during the 2020 political season, and we anticipate this to be the case again in the upcoming midterms.

The biggest surge in programmatic advertising for political campaigns came from CTV devices. This is still an emerging space, but Basis saw a +280% increase in CTV share of programmatic advertising from 2018 to 2020—including 225 million CTV impressions served in the four weeks leading up to election day. According to eMarketer, US political advertisers will spend $8.8 billion on video in 2022, with $3 billion of that going to digital video. With a contested midterm election cycle right around the corner, make sure you are fully equipped to pitch digital video (and more!) in the political space.

With so much uncertainty surrounding what and where political advertisements can run, Basis Technologies has rolled out reliable, stable, and advanced capabilities to empower these campaigns. Basis is here to help navigate the murky waters of political advertising in 2022 through numerous targeting and support options, including:

  • Voter File Integrations: L2, DeepRoot, TargetSmart, i360, DataTrust and more
  • Political Specific PMP Deals: Pre-negotiated for Basis clients with major media outlets such as Viacom, Xandr, and SpotX
  • Congressional District Targeting: Currently updating for ’22 with revised district lines coming out of the latest US Census
  • Priority Customer Support: Specialized for political clients, “on-call” team for ad creative reviews and approval within hours
  • Automated Campaign Disclosure: Built-in feature to adhere to the Digital Advertising Alliance’s (DAA) Political Ad Icon
  • ‘Off the Shelf’ Data: 3rdparty audience and contextual political data segments readily available in the DSP including left and right leaning, political interests, Left and Right TV watchers, affiliation by party, and much more

Be sure to reach out to your Basis team with any and all targeting questions, and be on the lookout for updates to the PMP deal library as more politically focused deals are added. For more information on political advertising, join us for our next Rev Up Revenue webinar on March 22, and check out our political resources in the Resource Library.