With just weeks left until voters head to the polls, Democrats are increasingly prioritizing advertising on streaming services over traditional television.
Just days before the Democratic National Convention, the Harris campaign announced plans to reserve at least $370 million in advertising buys for the coming weeks; $200 million of that will be spent on digital ads, with much of it reportedly going to streaming services like Hulu and the Roku Channel. That’s markedly different from the last presidential election cycle, when both consumer eyeballs and political ad dollars were still firmly married to traditional TV.
“This is the first presidential election where connected television advertising has been available at scale,” says Mark Jablonowski, president and CTO of DSPolitical, which helps Democratic campaigns with their digital advertising efforts. “Four years ago, it just wasn’t there.”
Consumers are experiencing this shift to widely varying degrees, depending on the state they live in as well as which streaming service they subscribe to. While some services are already saturated with campaign ads, others do not allow political advertising at all—making their viewers all the more elusive to both political parties.
TV has reached a tipping point
There’s a simple explanation as to why campaigns are reallocating ad dollars to streaming: It’s where voters are spending more and more of their time. Cord-cutting has chipped away at traditional pay TV for years, but the trend accelerated during the pandemic. Comcast, the nation’s largest cable TV company, reported about 13 million pay TV subscribers in its most recent quarterly report, a huge dip from 20 million in 2019.
At the same time, streaming has exploded. Streaming device maker Roku reported in early 2020 that its customers were streaming around 12 billion hours of programming per quarter. Since then, that number has grown to 30 billion-plus hours per quarter. In July, streaming accounted for a record-breaking 41.4% of all TV usage in the U.S., according to Nielsen. Cable came in as a distant second with 26.7%, while broadcast TV accounted for 20.3%.
“We’ve seen a massive shift in the way content is consumed, the way television is accessed,” says Jaime Vasil, VP of candidates and causes at ad tech company Basis Technologies.
