• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, September 19, 2023

They say what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. The problem for many non-political media buyers is they may not even be able to get into Vegas now through November 2024, because they'll be crowded out by their political media-buying counterparts.

That's because Las Vegas is the most "fiery" political media market in the nation, according to proprietary data released as part of a new report published by Stagwell's Assembly Media unit.

The data, which the agency calls the Assembly Marketing Intensity Index, or AMII, for short, indexes Las Vegas as a 9.88 on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 ranking as the most crowded possible local media marketplace.

"It tells you where and when spending will be at its highest," explains Assembly Director of Political Strategy Tyler Goldberg, adding, "So if you're an advertiser in Las Vegas, you need to be making preparations now for increased costs, for less inventory, for getting preempted -- all of those practical media planning and buying cases."

And it's not just acquiring the media avails in Las Vegas -- or the other over-indexed political media markets (see chart above), says Goldberg, noting, "You also have to worry about what all of that creative is doing to consumer sentiment in those markets."

While the Assembly report focuses on the acute political advertising demand occurring in the top AMII markets, Goldberg says the agency's planners and buyers also need to help steward general market advertisers around all the political noise, which won't just be crowding out conventional consumer messaging, but may actually disrupt the mindset of local consumers in a way that may not make them conducive to advertising for regular brands.

"If a consumer feels a certain way about a political issue, sees an ad about that political issue, and then sees your brand's ad right after it, they could be in a completely different state of mind than what you may have intended," Goldberg explains, adding, "And that can have a real effect on spending power."

If there's one core insight Goldberg would like to leave advertisers, planners and buyers with, it's that the $12 billion in political ad spending Assembly estimates will get spent in this political cycle won't just impact those hotly contested media markets, but the overall sentiment of American consumers in the run-up to November 2024.

"With $12 billion in spending, politics is going to be all around us. Consumers are being exposed to more of it than I think consumer advertisers realize."