Political campaign is using digital offers as a method of targeting voters, particularly undecided and influential voters who are consuming most information from the web. Spending on political ads hits over 4 billion dollars in 2020 throughout the recent presidential campaign as per the reports from Wall Street Journal.
Growth of Political Spending Overtime
In 2020, spending on political ads reached an accumulated amount of over 10 billion dollars, as per latest US advertising forecast. That is a huge increase from the 8.7 billion dollar spending back in 2018 when the midterm congressional elections were held and also, from the 6.3 billion dollars spent in 2016 when Donald Trump became the elected president.
Wall Street Journal reported as well that the growth between presidential campaign period is growing, with political ad spending gone up by over 2 billion dollars between the years 2012 and 2016 and by over a billion dollars between 2008 and 2012. Spending in political campaigns in 2018 accounted for over 2 percent of total digital advertisement spending in the United States and in 2020, digital political ad spent rose to over 2.8 billion dollars or 2.2 percent of the overall digital ad spending.
Here are key insights that will give light to why there is such huge growth in political ad spending from the past years.
- 41 percent of US internet users think that they are seeing tons of political ads on TV
- 43 percent of the registered voters in the US are searching for additional info about candidates after seeing a digital ad
- 65 percent of adults are using digital channels to acquire information regarding the election and;
- 78 percent of US adults learnt about presidential election via TV
TV Ads
TV ads presently stays to be the preferred choice for media among politicians and it has been reported that TV ads spending has grown by 3.1 percent in 2018 with a total accumulated amount of 72.40 billion dollars. The political spending around the US midterm election cycle was the driving factor behind the surge. TV ads spending was so high that it even surpasses private businesses such as those in selling tanque polipropileno and in other industries.
On the other hand, with the continuous use of people in digital media, experts forecast that it will match TV ads or even surpass it sooner or later.