By Andy Yates & Bill Greener III
The Situation
For decades, politics set the pace for innovation in targeted messaging. Direct mail, patch-through calls, and more recently SMS/MMS texting were all pioneered on the campaign trail before the corporate world adopted them.
Today, that’s no longer the case. The commercial sector is miles ahead, while politics lags badly behind.
The Numbers
In 2025, the average American will spend nearly eight hours a day consuming digital media across devices. If you want to reach voters where they actually spend their time, that’s where your focus must be.
In 2024, commercial marketers allocated 78% of their ad budgets to digital platforms. In politics, the figure was just 36%—up from 27% in 2020, but the gap between the two industries has actually widened, from 36 points in 2020 to 42 points in 2024.
Unless you think the most sophisticated commercial advertisers in the world are wrong, the political industry has to ask: What are we doing? There are understandable reasons for the difference—but none that justify ignoring the trend any longer.
The New Reality Is Already Here
In 2016, 82% of American households with a television also had cable or satellite service. That number has fallen to about 35% and the freefall is continuing.
Meanwhile, 85% of Americans watch YouTube. Linear TV is in structural decline, and no business model can reverse it. This isn’t about bad management—it’s about technology. Radio didn’t lose to television because of poor strategy. It lost to a superior medium. The same thing is happening to linear platforms now.
Why Commercial Advertisers Waste Less
In the commercial world, every tactic is judged by one question: Did it increase sales or improve brand reputation? Results and efficiency are everything.
If you’d predicted just a few years ago that you could watch an NFL game without seeing a beer or McDonald’s ad, people would have laughed. Yet here we are.
Corporate advertisers constantly test platforms, track performance, and control costs. That’s how they stay ahead in a rapidly shifting media environment.
Why Politics Works Differently
Campaigns are structured in silos. Research, creative, production, and placement are often handled by separate vendors, reporting to a small internal team. Measuring ad effectiveness is mostly a matter of tracking poll numbers before and after an ad run—numbers that can be affected by countless outside factors.
Few campaigns invest in studying how to deliver messages more efficiently. They’re focused on winning this election, not building data for the future. National party committees could fill that gap, but individual campaigns would rather have the cash. And that’s understandable—their job is to win now.
How the Money Gets Spent
In politics, spending habits are shaped by what’s worked before, not by where efficiency gains are possible.
Yet the math is straightforward: reaching the same number of people with the same frequency costs less on digital than on linear TV. And unlike linear buys, which are sold by Designated Market Area (DMA) regardless of district lines, digital lets you reach only the voters who matter.
If you’re running for Congress in the Washington, D.C. DMA, a TV buy wastes most of your spend on people outside your district. That’s baked into the model.
Until campaigns accept that digital can be just as persuasive—and far more efficient—the industry will stay stuck in a “dance with who brought you” mindset.
The Advantage Is in the Details
Switching to digital isn’t about a straight dollar-for-dollar swap from TV. The real advantage comes from precision.
Digital can target registered voters in your exact district, then narrow by partisanship, voting history, age, gender, and top issues. Campaigns can test languages, creative formats, and even influencer partnerships—ads with influencer content, for example, have produced 42% higher engagement than standard creative.
The right mix varies by platform, language, and audience. The only way to know is to test and measure.
The Bottom Line
Commercial advertisers have already made the shift to digital because it works. It reaches the right people where they spend their time, produces better targeting, and costs less.
Politics needs to follow—quickly. That means reducing reliance on linear TV, ramping up smart digital investment, and adapting to the reality of how voters consume media in 2025.
The first party to align its media strategy with modern consumption patterns will have a real, measurable edge.