During an election year, advertising spending cumulatively goes through the roof due to the massive increase in political advertising. We often tend to associate this with more traditional advertising methods — like television, for example — as well as in-person campaign events. 
 
In the contemporary digital age, however, this means a lot of advertising that’s, well, exactly that. You surely notice the uptick in digital political ads every two and four years yourself, whether on YouTube, social media, or elsewhere. In 2024, Axios projects political spending to be up over 30% from the 2020 presidential election season, with upwards of $16 billion spent. 
 
So, when it comes to your own digital marketing, that means that, during these cycles, you’re operating in an ecosystem where prices are spiking. How should we adapt to this? 

What This “Competition” Means for Your Own Digital Outlook 

We’re putting competition in quotes above because, obviously, political advertising isn’t your competition in the conventional sense. However, in the digital sphere, everything is “competition” in the way that your bidding doesn’t exist in a vacuum. So, everyone who’s making bids is affecting your own. 

Add in an election year, and now you’re seeing an additional billions of dollars in ad spend. Even if you’re selling bicycles and they’re trying to get elected, you’re still bidding for eyes online. And even if you’re not bidding on the same terms or users, you’re only a few degrees of separation away. Essentially: No matter how separate you feel you are from candidates’ target audience and keywords, you’re affected by election year spending whether you realize it or not. 

With this in mind, you’ll likely see an increase in multiple “cost-per” metrics, particularly CPMs, AKA cost per 1,000 impressions. Implicitly, this means during an election year your ads will likely have reduced overall coverage. We would recommend increasing spend to combat the growing competition for ad space in order to maintain steady performance. While this will not improve rising CPMs leading up to the election, it will help your account maintain performance metrics and avoid a drastic decrease.  

This impact will be heightened if you’re in a battleground state, since those are the recipients of disproportionate amounts of advertising spending by political campaigns. Or, put differently, those are the recipients of more spending with which you’re competing.   

Fatigue Over Ads and How That Affects Consumer Behavior 

When considering how to best reach your relevant audience, think about your own experience as an internet user. This is good advice in general, but especially so during election season when we’re all getting inundated with ads, political and otherwise. 

Presumably, your experience is similar to the people you hope to advertise to: exhausted by this onslaught — and pretty over it. 

That’s probably a good way to think of the people you’re trying to reach and to adapt accordingly. Most if not all of them aren’t feeling particularly receptive to “advertising as usual” and are — reasonably, really — starting from a baseline of skepticism if not downright cynicism. 

And who can blame them, really? They’re trying to use a utility (the internet) and getting interrupted often by ads that are likely even more repetitive than normal. This means you and your ads need to be even more empathetic, more compelling, more relevant, and more immediate than usual. 

With that in mind, we cannot recommend enough establishing a clear plan on how you can refresh your creative — particularly heading into the “election homestretch” as political advertising and subsequently digital advertising as a whole gets extra intense. At the same time, keep an extra eye on indications of changing user behavior so you can stay aware and adjust accordingly. 

Bottom line: Your audience is tired. Consider with empathy how you can speak to them effectively when they’re feeling this way. Regularly introducing new, engaging and emotionally driven content will help fight the audience burnout.  

How to Combat These Effects 

Along with what we already discussed above on just clearly considering users’ points of view (or, more than normal, anyway) and then from there clearly articulating your own ways of communicating with that POV, there are some other things you can do to give yourself a good foundation during these tricky seasons. 

First, plan ahead — more than usual. 

You don’t want to find yourself in the fall going “Okay, let’s start thinking about this.” Ideally, if it’s a presidential election, you should be considering this at the start of the year. This will help you be ready when the political spending really starts to escalate. 

During the early stages of this planning, start to examine factors that can clarify how impacted you’ll be by increased political spending. For starters: How much overlap does your target audience have with certain politicians’ or causes’ target audiences? Additionally, it is important to consider pivoting your audience targeting as you get closer to the election. Focusing on first-party data and reducing prospecting spend will help maintain performance. 

Furthermore, depending on your marketing approach, you’ll likely need to plan for your budget to increase. This is especially true if you’re in a battleground state. 

At the same time, you’ll likely want to adjust the weight you put on different marketing channels — paid and organic. For example, Meta and CTV are at the forefront of political spending. There’s also an added emphasis in political spending on YouTube ads. Considering this, how can you shift your advertising to other platforms — search, for example, or podcast or audio ads — to put greater resources into those with less “competition” from political spending. Similarly, you may find that organic channels are more valuable during election times. 

Just like with so much of online marketing, we can’t just point to a one-size-fits-all solution. This environment is dynamic and constantly changing, so you must, too. However, we can point to some best practices that will help you out. By being especially empathetic to your audience’s perspective, planning extra ahead, and being adaptable with your overall approach, you’ll be laying a strong foundation to get you through the added trickiness of an election year.