Most people in politics are intensely focused on President Donald Trump’s polling numbers in battleground states or the latest horse race numbers in the fight for the Democratic presidential nomination. For those of us in the CMAG group at Kantar, it’s that time of the election cycle when everyone is asking us for our number – how much is going to be spent on advertising during the 2020 cycle.
Media companies and the Wall Street analysts that cover them are also focused on predicting how much will be spent on political media during the impending election. And, there are some eye-popping numbers out there. In a Wall Street Journal article, forecasters at ad buying firm Group M estimated that $10 billion would be spent during the 2020 election cycle while PQ Media pegged the number at more than $8 billion in a report flagged by industry newsletter, Spots and Dots. At Kantar, we also expect a year where spending will flow - but not by nearly as much as other sources expect.
Factors to Consider
There can be little doubt that 2020 is set to be a record year (most are) for political ad spending and digital is poised to grab an increased share of that spend. Democrats are fired up, President Trump is aiming to bank a billion dollars for his re-election campaign, and campaign managers who grew up on digital will be in charge of many campaigns. Still, most estimates of political ad spending are wildly exaggerated. Many of these estimates simply inflate previous studies that implausibly showed more money spent on political ads than was raised and spent on all items in all political campaigns. Consequently, these high baselines lead to new estimates that assume advertising alone in the upcoming year will attract more spending than is likely to be raised and spent on all campaign activities in the current election cycle.
- The best way to predict how much will be spent on political advertising and on what platforms is to ask and answer some basic questions.
- How much money is going to be raised and spent on election activity?
- Because different sponsors pay different rates for television spots, we need to know who (candidates or groups) is going to raise and spend that money?
- How much of the money raised will go to paid “message delivery” spending?
- What share of that will be direct mail, television, radio, digital?
- When it comes to television, how much will be national versus local?
- How much will be spent on cable versus broadcast?
The truth is that politics is not the most transparent business in the world and that we have limited visibility into some major areas of campaign spending. Still, although there are some significant unknowns in answering these questions, objective data and informed extrapolations from a variety of sources can provide...