• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, January 17, 2025

WASHINGTON, DC -- Asked what political media buyers will be talking about onstage at MediaPost's annual "Marketing Politics" conference here two years from now in 2027, Assembly Director of Political Strategy Tyler Goldberg quipped: "The first $10 billion midterm cycle."

(Pause for audience laughter.)

"That's where it's going," he told a roomful of political media and marketing specialists gathered here Thursday, adding: "The money is there, just looking at the map with a lot of competitive races."

Citing data from a new market projection tool developed by Stagwell's Assembly unit, Goldberg said, noting, the number of competitive House and Senate seats that will be up for grabs.

Goldberg's prediction is quite a leap for a midterm considering that the just-concluded 2024 presidential election cycle came in just shy of the $10 billion figure, according estimates presented earlier the day by his boss, Stagwell CEO Mark Penn (see below), during his keynote breaking down five key elements for a successful presidential run.

"How much of those $10 billion will be going toward podcasts and audio in general," added fellow panelist, Senate Majority PAC Digital Director Amanda Ach, given the instrumental role the medium played in this past election cycle.

One thing that could hold back a significant uptick in political media budget share shifting to podcasts, or other digital media for that matter, is the lack of transparency when it comes to so-called "shared competitive," which is data supplied by sellers detailing how much -- and importantly, at what cost -- rival political campaigns are spending on their outlets and platforms.

The subject of shared competitive repeated itself several times on the panel, and it became clear to me -- actually a lightbulb finally went off in my all too dim-witted head -- about why exactly linear TV has remained the dominant part of political advertising budgets for so long. Sure, CTV has blossomed as a reach extender (see above) in recent years, but that's likely just a function of political media operatives taking a marginal leap of faith vis a vis the lack of shared competitive data for TV's digital counterpart, if only because of the erosion of linear's reach, and the need to reach "viewers" elsewhere.

And as the SMPAC's Ach noted, listeners too.

In fact, given the degree of relative importance political media-buyers put on the level of competitive media intelligence data they are able to derive from linear TV -- thanks to long-standing Federal Communications Commission and Federal Elections Commission public disclosure requirements -- I had to ask Goldberg if that might be something that could also benefit media sellers -- especially the languishing broadcast TV stations that nowadays only benefit incrementally during election cycles.

Specifically, I asked him why -- if stations benefit so much from transparently sharing their competitive ad spending data with political advertising campaigns -- that they don't do the same thing with conventional commercial advertiser campaigns? I mean, couldn't that be a possible windfall that would help linear TV stations standout from the morass of digital media eating their lunch? Last time I checked, digital now accounts for more than two-thirds of total ad spending in the U.S. and TV stations are dividing an decreasingly smaller pie of analog ad dollars (when they're not benefiting from incremental election spending cycles).

"My assumption," Goldberg replied, "is that the pricing structure is different on commercial. There's negotiations. There's upfront deals and all of that. As opposed to when you're a political campaign getting the [federally mandated] lowest unit rate and you pretty much know what every other candidate is paying."

"I meant disclose unit pricing," I responded to Goldberg's points, suggesting that if linear TV benefits so greatly from the transparency -- even if it is imposed on them by federal regulators -- of shared competitive data in political advertising, why not do the same voluntarily for non-political commercial advertisers?

I mean, if pricing-level competitive intelligence has created a differentiated bonanza for linear TV enabling it to hold onto more than a 50% share of total ad spending in political campaigns, why not see if the intel does the same in the rest of the marketplace?

"I wish they would," Goldberg responded, adding, "That's a great question.

"More transparency is better for agencies, better for campaigns, better for vendors and better for consumers/voters."

In closing, here's my obligatory selfie with Stagwell's Penn (left), following his presentation, which can be viewed -- along with all the other panels and presentations -- here on the Marketing Politics event site as soon as our tech team finishes uploading them.