This year’s election cycle has been the most expensive of all time with more than $10 billion spent on advertising across formats.
But CTV is only about 13% of that total. As the case study below shows, campaigns that saw a bigger lift increased their CTV budget to gain an edge.
VIZIO recently worked with a political candidate on an ad campaign that combined CTV ads with our Household Connect omnichannel feature to reach potential voters both on their TV sets and on other opted in devices like laptop computers, mobile phones, and tablets.
The candidate’s goal was to increase Preference and Voting Intent with constituents. In addition to the omnichannel approach, the campaign was targeted to voters within the candidate’s districts, with the objective of reaching only voters with the ability to cast a vote.
It started as a standard CTV video push across the target audience and geography. Then VIZIO’s Household Connect capabilities were leveraged to re-target those households exposed to the ads.
VIZIO Analytics then provided the candidate with a detailed report on the impact this effort had, both overall and by audience segments like Age, Gender, Geography, Voting History, and Political Party.
These actionable insights gave the candidate an idea of the strengths and vulnerabilities for each voter demographic. Overall, the campaign was credited with helping raise the candidate's KPIs in Ad Recall, Preference, and Voting Intent across exposed audiences.
Beyond the overall lift witnessed at the holistic campaign level, additional lifts were driven within key demographic/behavioral subsets. For instance:
As you can see, this campaign had an overall positive performance using CTV and VIZIO’s other ad products, illustrating the powerful role that VIZIO can play in helping political campaigns reach their intended audiences.
Read on for additional insights from VIZIO’s Political Account Executive Maddy Regan on how smart TVs can help campaigns of all stripes execute both CTV and omnichannel strategies for maximum effect.
How have political campaigns incorporated CTV advertising to date?
CTV investment is not aligned with the amount of time Americans are spending streaming. Over $9 billion was spent on TV advertising during the 2022 midterm cycle. Of that, about 75% went toward traditional linear formats like broadcast and cable TV. AdImpact predicts $10.7B to be spent in the 2024 Election Cycle, but only 13% of that is predicted to be allocated to CTV.
The data shows that over 50% of U.S. households have cut the cord. Streaming’s share of TV has increased to over 53%, while cable and satellite combined fell below 47%. So, while 50% of the audience is only watching TV via streaming and digital formats, only 25% of the ad buy is going to these new formats.
Why do you think streaming ad spend hasn’t yet caught up to streaming viewership?
Political advertising is in a transitional phase where most people acknowledge the decline of linear viewership and the increase in streaming, but the CTV/OTT landscape is so crowded and fragmented, creating a difficult and overwhelming experience for media buyers. Does the impression belong to the broadcaster, streaming distributor, or device owner? How do you buy the most efficiently and effectively? Do I buy direct or programmatically? What does premium inventory even mean?
Device owners such as VIZIO have insight into both what people are watching and how they are watching. Media buyers can leverage our viewership data to make informed and strategic decisions on where to reach their target voters.
How does VIZIO address streaming marketplace challenges?
VIZIO owns both the hardware of the television and the software that powers it, providing access to an array of viewership data that lives within the TV. In turn, we use this data to deliver the right ad to the right screen at the right time. With endless streaming options, VIZIO helps find audiences no matter what they are watching on their opted-in TV.
What kind of subset of the U.S. population do VIZIO users represent?
VIZIO is the “every person” TV and is representative of the US population. We are a top-selling Smart TV brand sold at major retailers across the U.S., which leads to our wide geographic footprint.
While VIZIO sells TVs at an affordable price point, we see about 40% of our audience with a household income over $100k. Given these wide ranges of age, geo, and household income, we can narrow in on specific voter groups (i.e. young voters, multi-cultural voters, 1P voter lists, etc.) because we have that broad scale with our general audience.
All politics is local, they say. How granular can political ads get with their targeting, and what local programming options are available via streaming services?
Our geo-targeting spans from national to statewide to district to zip code. In terms of programming, the majority of our CTV inventory serves within our owned & operated WatchFree+, consisting of 300+ FAST channels and 12,000+ AVOD titles. WatchFree+ delivers national and local news FOR FREE to every VIZIO household. We have local news coverage in all battleground states and are continuing to build our Newsroom Library, adding local news channels in 20 markets like DC, Philly, Detroit, Atlanta, New York, and LA, not to mention our new Always-On Newsroom.
What targeting capabilities does your platform offer?
While demo and geo-targeting are important for political campaigns, we can get even more granular with our ACR data. As the device owner, we detect content and ads that come through the glass of the opted-in VIZIO TV across multiple services and inputs. We use ACR data to create custom segments for our clients including unexposed devices to candidates’ ads, low exposures to candidates’ ads, and exposures to competitive ads.
Building on that, we also just expanded our partnership with AdImpact to enhance our CTV targeting and analytics capabilities. As a result, political buyers can plan, target, and measure the impact of their campaigns at the local and congressional district level across our entire ad inventory on both linear and streaming. This gives campaigns the ability to better manage over or under-exposed audience segments and optimize both the reach and frequency of ads.
How does VIZIO data activate or target viewers?
As the device owner, we use our data to help political clients understand how their audiences are watching TV. What are they watching? What apps are they using? Are they over-indexing for news and sports? Do they have a gaming console plugged in? Are they a cord cutter?
VIZIO can provide data to clients around the number of devices in a specific district or state that are used exclusively for streaming, devices using a combination of streaming and linear, or in the unlikely event, not streaming at all. This type of data can be useful in fighting for more dollars to be allocated to streaming rather than linear to achieve incremental reach and a more evenly distributed frequency.
What kind of reporting features can political clients expect?
Standard reporting metrics are impression delivery, quartile completion rate, video completion rate, reach, and frequency.
At a specific spend threshold, we can generate post-campaign reports that look at the incremental reach that the client received in their campaign, and potentially what audience went unexposed to their ads for a future campaign consideration. We also have brand studies available, that could look at a control versus an exposed group that they can take surveys to determine things such as candidate familiarity, candidate favorability, awareness of specific issues, voter registration status, and intent to vote this cycle.
So rather than just relying on a post-ad poll, campaigns can get much of the same information from a brand lift study that you provide?
It's another data point for sure. The political campaigns move so quickly. They have to go up within hours, and they have to end at a certain date at a certain time, depending on when the elections are. In a case where we have enough lead time, sample size date, and impression level, we can create these surveys as an added value insight.
What did voters think about your ad? Did it resonate well? Did they remember it? What was the recall on it? Did they take an action after? Those are all things we could potentially track on these campaigns.
What other types of new innovations are available to campaigns? QR codes? Interactive ads?
In terms of QR code capability and execution, we can definitely do it. We offer interactive ad capability, including QR codes, through partnerships with Innovid and Brightline.
We have a product called Household Connect that extends cross-platform to reach additional screens within the VIZIO household. This product can extend to people’s phones, desktops, and tablets that are connected to the same IP address.
What else should political campaigns be thinking of when they consider CTV/streaming ad opportunities?
While the CTV/streaming market is extremely fragmented and crowded, there is still an inventory scarcity issue. Lean into your device partners to understand data beyond one individual app. Subscription churn rates are at an all-time high and device sellers like VIZIO have ACR data to track specific activity within the TV. FAST (free ad-supported streaming TV) is an up-and-coming medium that is growing rapidly — VIZIO has seen 70% growth in FAST viewership from Q2 2022 to Q2 2023.
When ad scarcity becomes an issue, we help our clients with inventory clearance. We take a solutions-first approach with our clients and work with them to make sure they are meeting their delivery goals and KPIs.
–
For more data, details, and insights into how VIZIO can help drive influence for your political campaign, fill out the form below to download a helpful information packet and connect with a VIZIO representative today.
Disclaimer: The information presented is not a guarantee of the future performance of VIZIO Ads, which is subject to factors which are beyond its control and may cause actual results to differ from expectations.
