How Should Brands Navigate Ad Spend During Election Cycles?

This election cycle, brands will need to navigate media buys amidst as much as $12 billion in political ad spend and a highly polarized viewership. In that environment, what steps should non-political advertisers take to ensure they’re managing their ad spend wisely? 

Earlier this year, the team at LiftLab engaged in a wide-ranging discussion to dive into this very question. Our particular focus was around how LiftLab can update its models and experiments to ensure its customers are maximally prepared for the uptick in political ad spend accordingly. To be sure, much of that discussion – which included our data science leadership alongside LiftLab advisor and celebrated marketing researcher Dr. Dominique Hanssens – was internal-only. However, a few nuggets were both widely applicable and too good not to pass along. With this in mind, I’m sharing five points below that marketing leaders won’t want to overlook as they steer their own brands through November 5^th and beyond. 

Political Ad Spend is Unlikely to Impact Social Media Prices

One common fear we’ve heard from advertisers is that the elections will drive spikes in social media advertising nationwide. Considering eMarketer estimates that political ad spending on social media will hit $605 million this year – an 86.7% jump from 2020 – those fears certainly feel justified.  

Here’s the good news: based on what we’ve seen through our internal price tracking and modeling, social media prices have stayed within bounds of their normal costs for the season thus far, and look set to stay stable through the remainder of elections season. That’s true for all the major social outlets in most of the US.  

The big (and likely unsurprising) caveat is that social media prices are in fact very high right now in battleground states, and we see no indication that those prices will be coming down through election day. Indeed, prices are so high that one LiftLab client – a major global brand – has paused all spend (not just social media) within battleground states through the end of the elections. 

In short: Yes, you likely need to rethink your social spend strategies in battleground states. In the rest of the US, your social media programs are likely to encounter business as usual.  

Test Across Colors 

When you’re conducting ad testing, you may be concerned – with good reason – that increased political ad spend is impacting your marketing effectiveness. That concern may be particularly warranted if you represent a “red” or “blue” brand or category (and if you’re not sure, this article may be a place to start). If you think politics is influencing responses to your ads, try running experiments in comparable locations across red and blue districts. Seeing if results change significantly based on political maps will indicate if your suspicions are warranted or not. 

Could Priming Effects Hurt Your Ads? 

One topic worth considering in swing states is ad pod order and the priming effect – the psychological phenomenon in which an experience is influenced by another experience that came just before. For a pointed example: if a voter sees an ad for a politician she finds distasteful, then immediately afterward sees an ad for your brand, that “bad taste in her mouth” may carry over to her experience of your ad as well.  

And while in swing states in particular the impact may be a wash – for every voter who dislikes a candidate, the next voter leans toward that person – it’s worth keeping in mind that negativity bias primes people to weigh negative feelings more heavily than positive ones, meaning the negative lingering effects of political ads may count more. 

To our team’s knowledge, this is an understudied question in the literature and needs further research. Lacking hard evidence, it’s an issue that media teams should bear in mind. 

Political Ad Spend Increases During Election Season

Even if they’re not as frequent an event as Holiday Shopping, Presidential elections are a seasonal event nonetheless. If available, look at prices from the last election cycle as an indicator of where things are headed this time around. More generally, be sure you’re planning your campaigns in line with the best practices for managing and measuring seasonal events. 

No, Consumer Spending (Probably) Won’t Take a Nosedive 

Come mid-November, will consumer sentiment take a nosedive? Thats’ an understandable fear of many marketers, concerned that a president-elect or anticipated winner will negatively impact consumer spending amongst opposing voters. Worried about the bad fiscal policies of the incoming leader, the thinking goes, consumers from the opposite party will play it safe by tightening their belts.  

This is a studied issue – and it appears that there’s little cause for concern. Researchers in Princeton University, Chicago Booth School of Business, and Argus Information & Advisory Services examined consumer habits following every US presidential election from 2000 through 2012, and found – in the words of one study recap, “ideological opposition to an election outcome may not be a driver of consumer behavior.” In fact, the recap points out, even when “self-reported planned purchases were significantly lower in counties that demonstrated the greatest ideological opposition to the incoming president…subsequent actual spending in those counties didn’t change.”   

In any election – and particularly in an election as contentious as this one – many consumers will inevitably be disappointed with the outcome. But they likely won’t punish brands by spending less as a result.  

Regardless of an election outcome, every brand should aim for efficient, data-driven ad spend. Get in touch to see how LiftLab can support your brand with precision insights and adapting election-season strategies.

Key Takeaways

1. Political ad spend is expected to impact social media costs in battleground states but likely won’t drive up prices nationally.
2. Brands should test ads across both “red” and “blue” areas to gauge political influence on ad effectiveness.
3. Priming effects from political ads could influence consumer perceptions of adjacent brand ads.
4. Historical data suggests consumer spending may remain stable post-election, even amid political division.