Throughout the duration of this campaign, our team saw unprecedented engagement with these tactics. While benchmarking for political ads is near impossible in an ever-changing legislative environment, audience targeting, serving of ad materials alongside trusted news content, and effective creative all play a role in ad performance.

Display Impressions, for instance, saw a click through rater of .51%, but overall interactions of nearly 4%. Social display (a tactic where organic facebook posts are served in place of an ad), the CTR for isolated posts topped 1.9%. These results are extremely strong.

But perhaps the most exciting piece of this puzzle is OTT. (For savvy digital advertisers looking for better control and comprehension of their video campaigns, streaming offers the tools and data necessary to speak to their audience meaningfully and at scale. Television ads are losing local audiences while the cost of TV spots remains the same. Political advertisers are reaching less and paying more for ads. TV is expensive, and online video has better-defined audience targeting capabilities at a much smaller price tag. Read more on this solution and its benefits here.)

Between mid-October 2022 and the November election, The Committee to elect Sheldon Neeley used OTT to create a firmer audience understanding of the candidate and his platform. These were consumed at pace, with the majority of the audience watching these advertisements to 100% completion.

Most of the attention paid to advertising expenditures through election season focuses on direct campaign spend. While the average dollars spent per cycle has dramatically increased over recent elections, most do not realize that issues advertising, PAC advertising, and “friends of” ads account for even larger average spends (often from out-of-state sources).

According to Ad Exchanger, most news media spend increases in recent campaigns were with programmatic, with one source quoting a 40% increase in revenue YoY based on booked revenue through Q4 2022.