TV ads are dead. Long live TV ads?

During the 2024 cycle, more than $11 billion was spent on political advertising in elections up and down the ballot. 

That’s a pretty astonishing figure, but what’s less shocking is the massive amount spent on television ads. In federal races, more than $3 billion was spent on TV ads - the old-school kind that run after Wheel of Fortune or between re-runs of Ancient Aliens. 

This week, progressive donor network Way to Win released a new interactive database allowing users to search and sort through every TV ad buy from federal races. The database serves as both a painful time capsule and a fascinating look at the macro-narratives that formed the basis of last year’s campaign. 

Way to Win’s tool allows you to easily sort campaign spending by issue area and dive deeper into how much money was spent on each specific ad or topic. For example, taken in aggregate across all federal campaigns, the data shows immigration and crime were the most prominent issues featured in ads run by Republicans. Looking at Democratic ad spending, it may come as no surprise that the top issue featured was abortion rights, followed by taxation. Take a look below:

“This dataset illustrates most clearly the differences in content, message and storytelling approach between Republicans and Democrats at all levels,” said Jenifer Fernandez Ancona, Co-Founder of Way to Win. “From Democrats at the presidential level, there was almost a total silence on hot-button issues that the right-wing drives a lot of narratives on like immigration and trans issues -- this feels problematic and doesn’t seem sustainable.”

As I noted last week in an interview with former Harris campaign Deputy Campaign Manager Rob Flaherty, the conversation about the value of TV ad spending in politics is so frequent that it has become pretty cliché. Every media buyer in Washington knows fewer voters are watching TV ads than ever before. But, there is powerful competitive pressure on political campaigns to continue investing in the tactic so the other side doesn’t outspend them. In other words, it’s a neverending arms race.

Recent data from Nielsen shows that only about 20.5% of TV viewers watch broadcast television and 24% watch cable. Instead, an increasing share of viewers are watching their favorite shows on streaming platforms like YouTube (12%), Netflix (7.9%), Disney (5%), and Prime Video (3.5%). Among the minority of Americans who watch traditional television, 64% grab their phone during commercial breaks, 15% leave the room, and 21% change the channel. Among the even smaller percentage of those people who watch television ads, 28% watch them on mute. 

Beyond directly reaching voters, however, TV ads can punch far above their weight in one key way: they have an outsized impact on political campaign coverage in the legacy media. For example, how many times did you hear about Republican attacks on Kamala Harris over transgender rights? Did you actually watch one of those ads on television? Or, more likely, did you just see news coverage about it? While the Trump campaign and its allies spent millions of dollars to run versions of the “Kamala is for They/Them” ad on TV in battleground states, the ensuing media frenzy about the ad’s content caused it to accumulate many more views. 

A cursory search finds that hundreds of news articles were published in every major U.S. media outlet covering the anti-trans Harris ads. Clips from the ads were played on repeat across cable news networks and talk radio stations while panels of pundits breathlessly debated their effectiveness. 

“As the infamous ‘They/Them’ ad shows, it’s clearly possible to drive a larger conversation in other media channels with paid, and even to drive positioning of your opponent with it,” Ancona says. “As we found in our post-election poll, many voters have reported opposing Harris because “she was too focused on trans issues,” despite her campaign’s almost total silence on it.”

Mayor Pete on Flagrant, by the numbers

As Democrats grapple with their perceived failure to break through in less political spaces online, many are pointing to Pete Buttigieg’s recent appearance on Andrew Schulz’s Flagrant podcast as a rare bright spot. 

According to a memo circulated by the Center for American Progress Action Fund, “Buttigieg’s appearance was mentioned in at least 195 social media posts among top political accounts in a three-day period between Tuesday, April 22, and Thursday, April 24. Those posts generated at least 2.8 million engagements and an estimated 44 million views.” 

CAP Action also noted that the most-viewed clip from the appearance was this one, where Pete hammers home messaging on improving Americans’ everyday lives. Content from the show continues to yield dividends: Another group I asked about the podcast estimated that the total view count on Pete x Flagrant content has now surpassed 70 million across social media platforms and continues to be distributed online. 

What’s Kemp running for?

Democrats scored an enormous win yesterday when Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp announced that he would not challenge Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff in next year’s must-win race for U.S. Senate in Georgia. Republicans had tried for months to get him to take on Ossoff, who they view as very vulnerable in the red-leaning state.

While he may not be running next year, Kemp appears to have been keeping his options open. For the past few months, his campaign and leadership PAC have been running digital advertising fundraising off of national issues and praising the Trump administration for its policies.

More things you should read: 

• If you’ve been on Instagram or TikTok lately, you’ve probably started to notice an uptick in more produced series or shows. Rolling Stone has a good look at how digital talk shows are “reinventing classic TV formats for an extremely online age.”

• A high schooler from Chicago wrote a fascinating essay in the Wall Street Journal about why boys in his generation like internet provocateurs like Andrew Tate

• The Los Angeles Times isn’t doing so great

• Vanity Fair has a good piece up on how Ezra Klein’s YouTube glow up is the future of podcasting.

• Here’s a good profile of MAGA digital advisor Alex Bruesewitz

• What ever happened to the TikTok ban, and did MAGA creators help save the app from extinction?

• The New Republic published this piece on “How the Right captured online culture.”

• So much abundance: Senate Democrats invited podcaster Ezra Klein and data analyst David Shor to speak at their retreat this week. Apparently it was Amy Klobuchar’s idea.

One last thing: Straight to Alcatraz

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