As political campaigns prepare for the 2025 elections and beyond, Comcast Advertising has released its Winning Strategies: Advertising Lessons from the 2024 Election Cycle report, offering a data-driven look at how advertisers can successfully reach voters in a changing media landscape. Sarah Fuller, Senior Director of Government and Advocacy at Comcast Advertising, unpacked key takeaways from the report and reflected on how political advertisers can build smarter, more impactful campaigns.
Fragmentation and Audience-First Buying Defined 2024
Reflecting on the 2024 election cycle, Fuller noted that several major shifts shaped how campaigns approached media. “The 2024 election hit a record-breaking $11 billion in spend, a significant increase from previous cycles,” she revealed. “Political advertising campaigns are incorporating a wider array of channels, moving beyond traditional TV and radio. Today, they include streaming, social, and programmatic audio.”
With audiences scattered across more platforms than ever, traditional media buying approaches no longer suffice. “It’s no longer about only buying networks or dayparts,” Fuller emphasized. “Today political advertisers need to better understand the audience they are trying to reach and know where and when those audiences engage with content.”
As a result, advertisers have had to shift to an audience-first strategy. “We are furnishing our clients with smarter, deterministic data which helps accurately identify audiences, and then layering on third-party data like demographic, behavioral, and psychographic data - as well as utilizing voter file data,” she explained. “Clients also can bring their data or industry voter segments so we can help to ensure they are reaching the right audiences at scale.”
A Multiscreen TV Base is Still Essential
While potential voting audiences are fragmented across screens and platforms, a multiscreen TV strategy should remain the base for any political campaign. As streaming continues to grow, traditional TV is still key - especially during election season. “TV isn’t going anywhere: it’s going everywhere.” Importantly, “one in three potential voters watch more TV around the time of the election.”
Not to mention, more than 50% of voter households consider TV important when it comes to evaluating candidates, highlighting the value of building a foundation that includes multiscreen TV to ensure that campaign messages reach the right audience and stick with them through election day.
Addressable Advertising Drives Targeted Impact
Fuller highlighted the power of addressable advertising to reach highly specific voter groups. “Political advertisers can utilize addressable advertising to serve targeted ads to specific households based on deterministic identifiers,” she explained. “Nearly one in three target households reached were only reached by addressable TV advertising.”
When added to broader campaigns, addressable boosts frequency. “Target audience frequency was +73% higher when addressable was added to a base campaign,” Fuller said.
Addressable advertising enables campaigns to “confidently identify, target, and reach particular audience segments such as Republicans, Democrats, non-voters, or voters with different perspectives on varied political issues,” she added. It also improves transparency and attribution: “Since addressable TV can help control which households are exposed to an ad, political advertisers can analyze reach and frequency across their TV strategies to understand campaign performance, including looking at analysis of exposed households and the actions they take (like website conversions).”
Programmatic Growth Creates New Opportunities
“Programmatic is growing across the board as it’s a more automated and efficient way to buy inventory,” said Fuller. In 2024, programmatic demand was “600% higher compared to previous election cycles.”
Political advertisers can use programmatic “as an overlay to their foundational multi-screen campaigns to fill in the gaps (where there isn’t enough inventory) and provide incremental reach and increased geographic targeting capabilities.”
With the growth of programmatic and streaming, Comcast’s ad tech platform FreeWheel has played an increasingly important role. “Bringing FreeWheel, closer, creating more synergies for our clients makes a ton of sense,” she said. “Having the ability to offer holistic multiscreen TV campaigns across all of the premium inventory we have and powered by the leading programmatic technology of FreeWheel, we can really address and deliver on the evolving needs of political advertisers.”
Looking Ahead to 2025 and Beyond
As campaign planning begins for the next election cycle, Fuller expects key trends from 2024 to continue. “I think, despite what you always read, traditional TV will continue to play a foundational role in political advertising,” she said. “But we’ll continue to see an increase in demand for streaming as well as programmatic buying, as advertisers look for efficiencies and effectiveness.”
She added, “Advertisers will be further looking for partners that can bring together premium media/inventory, accurate and reliable data, and innovative technology so that they can activate the most effective campaigns to reach potential voters, as well as providing transparent performance and attribution so they can gain insight into how their campaigns performed.”
The Winning Strategies report, she explained, is designed to guide political advertisers through this complexity. “Comcast Advertising analyzed over 10 billion impressions from the 2024 election cycle to glean insights from the most successful and highest reaching campaigns,” Fuller said. “The latest report provides a formula for success and key recommendations based on data, so that advertisers can effectively reach voters and drive results in 2025 and beyond.”
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