• by P.J. Bednarski , Staff Writer @pjbtweet, October 6, 2015

Name the advertising category you hate the most. Did you say political? Or did you scream it?

I would have screamed it. But for the upcoming election cycle, Borrell Associates has estimated $1 billion will be spent on digital media, much of it in online video. Of course! 

That’s where viewership is headed (along with a great big bunch of it still happily watching TV). And video’s biggest growth spot is via mobile, and so, if you follow a pretty simple logic, that’s where a lot of that $1 billion will go.

But then there’s this: ad blocking. Viewers and voters can’t do anything about the nauseating political ads that begin filling up TV airwaves in the months before the election. But they can, on digital platforms, take action. 

Political advertising online and on mobile that is anything like the political ads we are used to will create a huge new opportunity for ad blockers that even advertising’s most ardent backers would be hard-pressed to criticize.

Because, in fact, political ads these days aren’t there to persuade. They are there to repel. They create a scorched-earth political climate. All the niceties about creating better ads so that users won’t want to block seems to be a pointless crusade against an ad category that is actually intending to annoy.

No doubt, online video ads will be more frequent and videos posted to sites like YouTube and Facebook should multiply like crazy in ways that won’t seem so egregious, comparatively. Social media, especially Periscope and Meerkat, might be making news every day showing political operatives airing dirt, live.

Half of America hates the other half. That’s what you’ll see.

The New York Times today foretold the coming explosion of political digital activity and noted that politicians can perfectly target ads to would-be voters of the same political persuasion. And better yet, limit ads so that they are only seen in a specific geographic area.

The big trend in the coming election, NYT reported, will be the 15-second political commercial, made for mobile, and politicians are already figuring out ways to grab the attention of fleeting viewers with grabby messages, and some others planning silent  ads that will work with in the Facebook autoplay mode.

No doubt savvy political operatives will do all, that.

But many of the people online are young and as a demographic, young people don’t vote much. All that stuff you hear every day about reaching the millennial viewer is not quite as exciting in a national election.

They might care, passionately, about issues. But when you take the great big gang of them -- roughly 22% of the population -- most of them are not reliable voters. So much of that online political advertising is likely to be wasted.

But not all of it, by a long shot. Jon Swallen Kantar Media’s chief research officer points out in The Cook Report: “The leading edge of the huge Millennial cohort is now moving into an age bracket where historical voting participation rates begin to increase sharply. They will account for a larger share of votes cast—enough to tip competitive elections—and will bring with them their digital-centric media habits.”

We’ll see.

pj@mediapost.com