As reported by the New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/28/us/politics/2020-race-money.html) based on projections made by the  Center for Responsive Politics (https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2020/10/cost-of-2020-election-14billion-update)  the total spending for the 2020 elections more that doubled that of 2016 and clocked in at $14 billion!

While top of the ticket federal, state and some local campaigns continued to rely heavily on TV/Cable, direct mail and digital (including the increased use of OTT, text and sponsored content) accounted for the bulk of the spending for local, down ballot campaigns.

Lessons Learned

Early voting

o   the disruptive nature of the COVID 19 pandemic and its impact on the need for and the subsequent success of mail-in voting will fundamentally change the nature of early voting in future campaigns

o   campaigns must plan, budget and implement their messaging much earlier in the election process than ever before

 Increased number of younger voters

o   will require a shift in spending from direct mail (which is relatively more expensive and targets older people) to digital, social media and OTT

o   as digital and social media continue to evolve from FB/Instagram to Snapchat, Tik-Tok, text and whatever other social media alternatives will rise to the forefront, campaigns will need to adapt and allocate their budgets accordingly

 Data

o   as the socioeconomic, demographic and psychographic characteristics of voters continue to change, campaigns will need to craft unique messaging that speaks directly to the subsets within the target universe, not the broad messaging that campaigns reply on today – particularly for direct mail 

 2022 Target Universe

o   as we look forward to 2022, the 2020 counts should be heavily weighed versus the standard midterm election analysis of the past

o   the impact that early-voting had on 2020 is a game changer and to be on the safe side, the 2020 counts should be uses as the benchmark versus any sort of midterm and/or midterm/Presidential averaging as its always best to over-estimate voter turnout and budget/plan accordingly and have increased frequency if actual votes are less than estimated,

Shift in Spending

o   For future campaigns, it will be difficult to justify the significantly higher cost-per-contact of direct mail versus the continually evolving, better targeted and increasingly more cost-efficient digital, social and OTT options

 Given the inefficiencies and limited targeting capabilities of Broadcast TV, we believe that the combination of digital, cable TV, streaming audio/video and direct mail is the most cost-efficient and effective form of advertising and delivers significantly better results than any single tactic alone.

DIGITAL 

Our digital data / technology / ad serving partner literally invented Voter File Data Targeting and via the combination of cookie + IP based targeting has proven to have the highest reach of any programmatic platform.

CABLE