Why The 2026 Midterms Could Be The Biggest Political Ad Cycle Ever

For years, political advertising has been one of local media's most reliable revenue engines. But according to AdImpact's Updated Political Projections Report, the 2026 midterms could set a new record, generating even more ad spending than the 2024 presidential election cycle.

That raises a host of questions for broadcasters, advertisers, and media companies alike. What's driving the continued surge in political spending? Why does broadcast television continue to command such a large share of campaign dollars despite the rise of CTV and digital targeting? And what does the increasingly data-driven world of political media buying reveal about the future of local advertising more broadly?

On the latest episode of In the Vicinity, Tim Hanlon sits down with AdImpact CEO Kyle Roberts to unpack the report's findings and explore why political advertising remains one of the most consequential forces shaping local media.

Listen to the full In the Vicinity podcast above or get it on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Tim Hanlon: Welcome back. You are In the Vicinity. Hello, everybody. My name is Tim Hanlon. I am the founder and the CEO of the Vertere Group here in Chicago, where we consultatively help and advise lots of firms in and around the media and technology spaces. And as you might know by now, this is our little weekly sojourn into our various discussions into the local media space.

Lots of fun and frivolity that we've had thus far, some really intriguing conversations, and knowledge to be had. And this week is no exception. And knowledge is supreme in this upcoming conversation that you will enjoy in just a few moments with our guest this week, Kyle Roberts. He is the founder and CEO of AdImpact, which if you are in the business of political advertising, either on the sales side or local media sales or on the buy side with various campaigns and PACs and that kind of stuff, you will know AdImpact and Kyle as essentially the supreme gold standard, perhaps platinum standard.

Is there anything above platinum? In terms of all things political ad spending, if you wanna know what, where, when, how, and everything else in between political ad spend and where ads are being seen, how they're being consumed, the data and analytics around all of that stuff, AdImpact is the go-to place to find out all of that information.

And we're happy to have Kyle kinda walk us through some of the dynamics especially for those who are uninitiated, about how all this stuff works and the importance of advertising from the political realm is to things like local broadcasters in particular but certainly local media generally.

And highly encourage you to check out their latest report, which we'll be talking about in a moment's time. It's their updated political projection report. You can download a copy of it from their website at AdImpact, one word, .com. And you can sign up for their newsletter and all that kind of stuff.

But you will be amazed at just the level of specificity and detail and just the outsize importance of political advertising, the revenue that's expected from it, and a- as we'll talk about, the seemingly unending increase in that spend. Hugely important for local media, and let's get into the conversation now to learn more.

Here's my chat with Kyle that we had a few days back. Please, as always, enjoy.

Great to have you in this conversation. We focus, as on, on all things local media, and I don't think there's anything more hyper important to all forms of local media, especially local television stations, than that of political advertising. And it is fraught with peril if it doesn't come in as predicted, and it certainly has gotten voluminously more important over the last five to ten years at least.

But before we kinda get into the nitty-gritty as well as your new report Kyle, give us some background on you and the firm, how both have evolved over the last couple years, how you got involved i-in particular. 

Kyle Roberts: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you, Tim, and thank you for having me on your show.

Just, so just a little bit about me I come from the political media agency side. I started in that business in 1992. In 2005 I started my own political media buying firm called Smart Media Group. That firm's still in existence. So I have a lot of background in this world. I started AdImpact in 2014 as I saw the need for a really increased amount of data collection in the lo- especially in the polo- political space, but in the local media space too, 'cause you have to do both, 'cause of course, political is so hyper local.

So I started that company in 2014. Of course, AdImpact now has been around for twelve years. We have the updated political prediction. But what is... You know me, I was a media buyer. I was literally a hands-on keyboard guy. I started out that way a-and now I'm very active in the political market still today, writing these predictions, looking at all the trends, and of course, AdImpact it's a competitive media intelligence company.

That's what it is. What does it do? It's tracking. Pretty much we look for every single local ad that we can find in the United States every day, and that gets us about three thousand ads a day. Do that over 365 days, right? You do the math, you're talking about millions of ads in the ad catalog. Why is that?

When you're working in the political sphere back in, what, 2004 when Senator [John] Thune became a senator, you're working in a state like South Dakota, and not many people care about the Sioux Falls or Rapid City media markets because they're so small. But in politics, they're actually really big.

A lot of money goes into those. They're competitive races, so you need to build systems that track even in the smallest markets, and that's what AdImpact did, right? And so when you scale that up to non-political work, you really, you have, because of that, AdImpact has great visibility into the local markets and into all local ad activity.

From there, we tracked, of course. So since we track all the ads, we also track all the spending. A lot of that's publicly available information through the FEC, the Federal Election Commission, or the Federal Communications Commission. So you have all these multiple data sources. We collect all that stuff, we match it up against ads.

It gives us a really good idea as to what's going on in the political marketplace. With me because I've been living and breathing that for so many years, I just have such a good understanding around building the right tools and building the right products in terms of what the market's gonna need.

And I've really enjoyed doing that. I really like building software. I love building data sources. I love seeing new data sources, examining them, and then figuring out, do they have applicability? Is there value we can drive here in the market? I love those kinds of questions. I love those builds, business questions.

I also love building teams within my company, to help address some of the biggest challenges out there in the environment. So I'll stop there and take another question. I can go on for hours because I do, I have such a passion for the business itself. A- and there's just a constant demand for need and for problems that I just love to solve.

Tim Hanlon: So we'll get into the, some of the nitty-gritty of the current report, and that sort of gives maybe our listeners a bit more of a flavor of the kinds of stuff that one can expect from AdImpact's reportage. But before we kinda get there, how about a little bit of insight, both from your own personal experience as well as what you've learned, if you will, on the other side or correlated to the process of media buying for political?

'Cause it is very much a different animal than the traditional brand marketing and/or traditional agency thing. You mentioned perhaps one of the most important differences or differentiations in that small markets in C and D county-heavy states are just as important, if not more than the largest DMAs in the country, which brand marketers and/or regional ones, and arguably lar- local ones care about more.

But that's not the only distinction. The flow of money in and out, the rapidity, if you will, the U-turns in terms of how money comes in, where that money is sourced from, all that stuff is, it's like completely foreign to the traditional way of brand marketing. 

Kyle Roberts: Yeah, it totally is.

They're two completely different animals. You know better than I do, but in the non-political space, in the non-political media buying space, you're not gonna buy probably more than, what, 20 or 30 local markets, and after that you go national. So nobody really cares about anything from 30 market size to 210.

But of course, in politics, we care about every single local market because you just never know where a race, where a highly competitive race is gonna show up. South Dakota's a perfect example. And if there's something competitive going on there, political will be the absolute biggest thing there for the entire year, bigger than any other local advertiser or any other national advertiser that comes in. Local is extremely important. Now, the buying piece though, okay, itself as an agency guy, as a person who did that for many years, the real key to it is precision execution. You could get a phone call today, "I need to be up Monday in 30 markets. Here's the budget, here are the flight dates, here's the creative, here's the audience. Get it done." And that will be done by Monday morning. We all have to build systems, all the agencies have to build systems to accept that kind of phone call. I don't think that happens much on the non-political side.

They're thinking out way, way far ahead. But political is, it's much closer to start, right? So you have very limited time to actually prepare things. That means you gotta have a lot of stuff standing and ready to move, and it's why, like AdImpact, it's why all the data sources refresh every two hours. They don't refresh weekly, not even daily.

It's not even good enough, because you don't know when you're gonna get a call where you have to execute something large. And when you do, you need to have competitive data sources. You need to know what's going on in all these local markets, what's happening in the environment, because I'm gonna go in there now and put some persuasion dollars into these markets.

I need to have a good sense of what the landscape looks like. So you're building tools like that. And then the other thing about political is, which is different from the core side, is you want to burn these impressions. You have a very limited time. Non-political advertisers maybe have two or three weeks to deliver their point calls.

In politics, you have seven days, and you better get your points in within those seven days. So the time pressures are much, much greater. The speed is much, much greater. Why? Because you have a very set deadline. You have either primary day or runoff day or the general election, right? You have these hard deadlines that you're always up against, and you have to have all of your points, all of your impressions delivered so that you can move on to the next creative.

You also need those tools so you can environment- env- evaluate the landscape in real time, so that when you're actually either deploying your buys or deploying your creative, your messaging timelines, it makes sense in the environment. So there's just a lot of moving pieces at once that you're managing under high time pressure.

Tim Hanlon: Yeah, it's on the brand marketing side or the traditional local ad buying side of things, right? I think there's almost a look towards the political realm as almost the worst case scenario from an operational standpoint, right? It's like the biggest stress test you could have.

If you could figure out the piping, the systems, the measurement, the data for the political thing, which is about as close to real time, quote unquote, as you'll get, on the local media front, right? Then everything else that comes along the most ridiculous retail campaign that needs to turn on a dime or some other thing in the realm of more classic brand marketing or retail marketing kind of stuff, would almost be kinda easy to do because you've stress test through political.

Kyle Roberts: Yeah, that's true in a way. It's true in a way. Most political agencies, though don't make the jump to the core side, and it doesn't happen the other way. So there are core agencies that try to get into it, and I think they give up because they think these guys are just too crazy. There's no way truthfully.

The other thing that has now come into this whole process is, because of, COVID's made so many changes, especially in politics and especially voting behavior. Remember, we couldn't go to the polls physically and vote, right? You had all this mail-in vote. You had all these different ways to cast a ballot.

That created a whole new process of early voting, absentee voting. So that also impacted how you had to develop your media plans and execute your messaging timeline. In some states like you could they could vote for eight weeks. I remember certain scandals can happen in the voting window where people have already cast votes and found out later I probably don't wanna vote for that person 'cause this or that scandal has broken."

That's one thing. The second thing that's happened is states, as votes come in, will track the votes and record whether or not the voters have cast a ballot or not. So you have this early vote audience, and then you have an election day audience. The early vote audience, if some states if people, some states you do and some states you don't.

But you think about digital advertising if I have that person that's already voted and I'm targeting with digital ads, I don't want them in that, in my first party universe anymore. I want to take them out. And then think about every day I'm gonna get an updated voter file, and every day I gotta go back to my campaign and I gotta remove all the people.

My universe, my targeting universe is gonna get smaller 'cause the right voters are coming out. So my frequency against those audiences is gonna get higher. You're doing tho- you're playing out those dynamics by day. That's what political agencies do. Again, I don't think that happens on the core side. I'm not sure 'cause I've never been a core media buyer, never worked at one of those agencies, but I don't think it does.

But so again, that's just an additional time pressure that's on you. And like I said earlier, it's really precision execution. You need really good systems to do this and implement it. 

Tim Hanlon: Yeah, what you're describing is, I guess what we would say in the lay terms is optimization. That's literally what you're doing on a daily and it is an almost hour-hourly basis, and that data is crucial to make sure that is optimized, especially in the digital realm, right? Or anything that is powered by digital. Now including television, which leads me to my next sort of question on this, right? And then we'll finally, we'll then we'll dig into the specific data here.

Because the mechanics of all this, I think, is somewhat mystical to those who don't do this on a regular basis, except maybe talking to a vice president or somebody else down the hallway who's expecting the cash flow to come in from all these political ads, right? Just as long as it's, it doesn't break, right?

They're okay with it, and they're gonna go back to their day jobs. But enlighten me a little bit further on, especially in the realm of local television, right? There's always been this historical incongruence, first time I've used that word today between what exists in terms of, say, congressional races and the various districts as they've been mapped out or gerrymandered or, and frankly now that's obvi- a hot topic now too, anew almost, versus that of what is buyable media inventory, which is still this historic construct in local markets of these, some would argue, somewhat artificial and/or ancient demographic boundaries, these DMAs, right?

How do you historically handle that incongruence with states and/or congressional districts that bleed over into these DMAs that necessitate, if you will, buying r-r-waste, if you will, because there's really no capability of doing so, at least in linear broadcast. We'll get to the CTV part of that in a minute.

Kyle Roberts: It's tough. Very tough. It's also wasteful too. Hugely wasteful. There was that special election. I think it was a New York one. It was a few years ago, and you had both of the committees, or outside groups, purchasing broadcast out of New York City. In the New York DMA. And you're talking about a district that's 375,000 voters. How many people live in the New York DMA? How many millions of people live? So think about that. And then when you really looked at the whole thing, when you mapped it out and you looked at the ad exposure, it was like 1% of the ads fell in the district.

And what's that cost per point? A couple thousand bucks. So you do the math and it's just not good. It's not good math. But that's sometimes a necessity to get reach into these districts. That's what happens, because you really have no other way. You're seeing with cord-cutting and cable subscribers it just, that-- While their viewership on cable is good, the mechanisms to get into those tiny districts through those cable subs is not as good anymore because of the cord-cutting, right?

People are viewing cable, they're just-- How we can access those viewers or access those voters within those districts via hardware and cable just isn't great anymore because of the sub count's so low. So that kinda hurts you. And what's the only vehicle that's gonna get me 100% reach into the district?

It is linear so sometimes, LA is the same thing, there are so many important districts. You did touch on it earlier, though. Let's see how redistricting isn't gonna change any of that. Those inefficiencies are still gonna be there. And again, there were districts I knew about in LA that you had to buy the DMA in order to get any kind of reach in there because you really just couldn't drive enough reach, you couldn't drive enough impressions to really move the needle in terms of the polling, and like broadcast was really the only thing you could do.

So sometimes it's just a necessary evil. 

Tim Hanlon: Yeah, it's very similar. The analogy I've used for many years is and back in the old days when Southwest Airlines was highly specific about their markets, right? They would advertise on Monday Night Football on ABC, right?

And there was efficiency in its inefficiency, right? They weren't flying into Denver at the time. They weren't flying into certain markets but at the end of the day they were quasi-national, and it was okay because it was efficient enough to be a nationally branded buy, if you will.

Even though they weren't flying to a number of markets, they kinda did the math and recognized there's no better way to break through, per se. And I guess where I go on the question on that, and I promise I'll, we'll get into the data, is I almost wonder, I don't wonder anymore, has bro- have broadcasters, if you will, local broadcasters, kinda just gotten used to the sloppy spending, if you will, and assume that there is always gonna be that efficiently inefficient component to buys that just makes their business impervious, if you will, to getting more specific or more data-centric, meaning that, you kinda just said it before, maybe you fell into the trap.

There's always the need for broadcast and do broadcasters just get away with that, or are we gonna kinda get to a world where that inefficiency is really gonna start to squeeze out of the system going forward, but maybe we're not there yet? 

Kyle Roberts: That's up to the broadcasters if they're gonna build any kind of systems to have more advanced targeting.

You know, you hear those conversations, but you really never see anything that indicates. You probably know more about those details than I do, but I just haven't seen anything appear. Now, do the broadcasters care about the inefficiency? I don't think they care at all. I think it's not the broadcast.

It's not driving them crazy. It's driving the CTV people crazy and the cable people crazy and the digital people crazy because why would you do that? Years ago, there was a company that put out this report, I think it was called the 50 States of Waste, and they went through all the congressional districts, and they went through how all the broadcast money that went through those CDs and how much waste there was as a result of it.

And you know what happened? Nobody cared. Why? Because, think about it, when you run these numbers and you look at the math, you're talking, in the House, you're looking at, what? Six districts. What is it? 218 to 212 right now. You're talking about six seats that make the difference.

You're talking about, just to give you an idea of the insanity of math, okay? You're talking about six seats. What is the average congressional district? 250,000 votes? Six seats. 110 million people will vote in the House races coming up here in 2026. How many votes is that?

You're looking at, what, 375,000 plus three votes in order to flip a district? Two billion dollars is gonna chase those votes, Tim. Think about that. Think about the volume of money that's gonna chase just to flip it, but everything is so close. Those three to three or four districts that flip the House, and what, 300 to 400,000 votes that flip the House, that'll play out across anywhere from, 18 to 40 districts, and you'll have $2 billion compressed into that, and broadcast is definitely gonna have a say in that.

There's no question about it. Why? Because there's a lot of money that will try to shift those votes to change the balance of power. That's really what this is ultimately about. And so the irrationality of what you just talked about, it's not irrational, but the inefficiency of it, what you just talked about, that's why those things show up.

Tim Hanlon: Okay, but the last thing on this, though, is you mentioned, you just said a word that I latch onto. That's compression, right? In the traditional brand world there's, so this sort of the reach and frequency thing, the old sort of media math of linear television, linear media. The rule of three, where the f- the first per- the first time is breakthrough, the second time is consideration, third time is choice or not to buy the product or at least, have it top of mind when you go into the store, right?

And that's, and there's lots of different variations to that over time, right? Very classic kind of model. Yep. But that compression that you're mentioning and the amount of money that has to be, if you will, bought or s- or to satiate on a limited time basis, right? It's like trying to fit a lot of stuff into a small funnel in a short amount of time.

There's burnout there. There's too much, right? There's repeats and all that kind of stuff where there, there's that tipping point where that messaging almost does a disservice or worse because there's so much of it, right? It's "Okay, stop hitting me over the head. I already voted," or I already made my decision.

Stop, trying to convince me otherwise," that kind of stuff, right? What you're saying in all of that, though, is that part of the irrationality is hat tonnage actually can do a huge disservice on a number of other levels. Is that also just taken for granted and just just part of the deal because we still need to reach those others who haven't made their mind up yet?

Kyle Roberts: Yes, in a way. But the other side to that, Tim, is another part of the strategy is to, you have a set population of voters, but then there's a population of voters that you might be able to turn out that don't normally vote And usually, because all the activity just doesn't stop, and people-- Like I was telling you earlier about the voter file you know who shows up, but then you also know that there's a potential universe of voters that might show up for you that, maybe haven't shown up in the past, so you're trying to persuade those people.

That's why this thing steamrolls, because as you notice, there's always this push to drive out new voters because of the way the electorate is. It's so locked at 50/50 when you do most of these polls. It's very tight. And so where are you gonna go now? You have to activate new segments of the voting population in order now to move elections.

And I think that's why you see the additional investment, and that's why you keep saying, "Oh my God, these ads just don't stop over and over." Yeah, they're reaching people that have already voted, but they're also trying to reach people that are low propensity voters that only have a 15 to 25% chance of voting.

That's why you still see this continuous push to drive more votes and to drive more persuasion. That's right. 

Tim Hanlon: I guess the question in there, and then we're gonna get into the data, I promise. The advent of digital technologies, the ability to more closely target, right?

CTV being a prime example, but all digital forms of media as well. I guess there's a belief out there that, amongst some in the ad cognoscenti that there would have been more of a movement, a more dramatic volume shift to those forms of advertising versus the broadcast kind of large scale, dominant voice messaging because of that specificity, because of that ability to maybe reach a more understood audience that is known, if you will, based on data, that they haven't voted in a while, or are subject to, are more independent-minded, or are not locked in already or loaded, or have voted, or haven't voted already.

It almost seems counterintuitive, right? That the broadcasting mass approach, if you will, is still as robust as it is given all of the rise of more targeted capabilities out there. Or maybe it's a shift that's ongoing, and we just haven't really seen it tip over yet. What do you think? 

Kyle Roberts: So we'll get to the data in a minute but I gotta use a piece of data, though, so I can make my point here. So the last midterm was 2022. We're looking at a 30% increase in total media spend since 2022. Okay, that's, basically it's three billion more dollars over 2022. So yes, to your point, okay, first of all, broadcast is still a very large impression base. Politics is a heavy local business.

Broadcast is still king in the local markets. You're talking about this targeting, and you're talking about all the independents and these, and the new data, new voter segments that I'm talking about. CTV now is in that picture 100%. It's a growing segment within politics. But, to your point, it's not this one-to-one where, oh, okay, now that CTV is here, broadcast is dead.

When there's three billion more dollars in the environment, you have a whole additional data set, you have a whole additional funding source now to fund an additional media type. And I'm not saying these media types are mutually exclusive, right? It's not just, "Oh, we're only gonna do broadcast, we're only gonna do CTV."

No, it's not that at all. You can work both of them together. You can work cable in there together. There's enough, because the pot's increasing, there's more dollars in the marketplace, you now have space for, of course, multiple media types to go and target and persuade certain voter segments.

And that, it varies by congressional district, it varies by House district, Senate district. They all vary. And a lot of the good agencies do all that research and they build those files. I was telling you earlier about how, yeah, from the voter file, voters get removed during the voting window.

But there's also a significant amount of modeling going on now with the voter file, significant amount of research and investment going into that, and creating these really specific audiences with specific messaging. That's happening a lot in politics now. But they're hitting these micro segments.

However, you still need that broad reach, you still need that large impression base of broadcast because you just don't know what else is out there. And sometimes if you're too targeted, if everything is just too targeted, there could be a universe of voters that you might have missed. That's always the hardest thing.

It's the hardest thing with a poll, it's the hardest thing with building an audience. The hardest question to answer is, who's actually gonna show up on election day? It is really the hardest question. And so all the research that goes into answering that question is really the most important thing about campaigns and companies that really help campaigns win and lose elections.

You don't help somebody lose an election, but help somebody win an election. It's really answering that question and having certainty around the answer, and then deploying strategy around that answer. It's really a fundamental thing, and if you miss it, you could lose. 

I tell everybody, a media buy doesn't win a campaign, but it can definitely lose a campaign.

Tim Hanlon: Yeah, you're talking about basically it's a total addressable market that you don't know. Every cycle is, it's always different based on whole bunches of things, right? Let's get into some of this data because this is your current report that came out a couple of days ago after we record this, we'll probably have this out next week, so people listening will have had a couple of days to see at least the headlines and if they're lucky enough to have gotten a subscription already or maybe we can convince some people to subscribe to the data to get it.

This was really a revision of your previous report and it's stunning because it's an increased expectation of, even let's put it this way, a very robust prediction in the first place. Put this in perspective because this is a midterm election, but headline this current cycle of spend supposedly is gonna actually outdo what we just experienced two years ago, which was presidential and congressional. 

Kyle Roberts: That's right. It's the first time, so that's right. It'll be bigger than 2024. And, how we do it, just so you know, is usually in July of the off year. So in July of 2025, we released the first report for the 2026 cycle. And we all sit around and we all… It's just like I said earlier, who's gonna show up and vote?

What are the things we're not thinking about right now in July of 2025 that are gonna happen in 2026? Because we've gotta start thinking about them, we gotta put them into the report so we get the prediction right. You can't know everything. Bottom line you don't know.

You don't know what the future holds. So what we do is in the even years, we'll update the report. That's how we run the prediction itself. We like to be very transparent with the market about how we do it, what we do, what goes into it. I've read a lot of the other predictions that are out there, and I just thought, "Okay, I wanna do this myself," but I just wanna, I wanna be really upfront with the market about what's going on.

All right, so that's why we have these two releases. Yes, you're seeing the dollars go up. We adjusted it up eight hundred million based upon various trend lines. And like I told you earlier, what's going on that we don't know? We didn't know what was gonna happen in that Texas Senate primary. We didn't know Tom Starr was gonna run for governor.

We didn't know the Ohio Senate race was gonna be so hot. We didn't know Sherrod Brown was gonna get in that race. It changes the dynamics. Candidates do change the dynamics of these races. And we thought in California there were gonna be more ballot initiatives that were gonna pass and that was gonna drive more money.

That didn't pan out, so we had to reduce some of our predictions. It's still gonna be very large in California. In fact, it's still number one, but it was lower than what we thought. We thought Florida would be a little bit hotter, but there were some changes there. So we made these adjustments. But overall, when you looked at 2025 itself, it paced ahead of all the previous odd number years.

2026 just it's pacing at, what did we say? It was, like, twenty-six percent ahead of 2024 at this time. So you could see there's a lot more activity, a lot more dollars. And, we're talking about elections this year in 2026. It's all just basically primaries, but you had a lot of very competitive, very expensive primaries early on.

But we don't, right now, we just don't see any signals in the data that tell us that we think spending is now gonna drop off because there's gonna be just very competitive House. Even though the redistricting is happening, that introduces an element of uncertainty into the whole environment.

Now, we did reduce our quote, "House prediction" down. But it's still gonna be the biggest number ever. It's still gonna be over two billion dollars, like I told you earlier. On the Senate side we bump that number up. We see a lot of competitive Senate races on the map. Again we changed around some of the states, but we didn't think Alaska was gonna be a big deal.

It's up 500%, more than 500%, than what we thought it was gonna be. There's just things that you don't know and you can't predict. But yes we're seeing growth across CTV. Broadcast is really the biggest winner here, and then we're seeing growth on cable. We are still seeing demand for linear cable.

In our earlier prediction, we thought that would be a little bit soft, a little bit challenged but we're still seeing continued demand there.

Tim Hanlon: Clarify that. Does that also include the virtual MVPD environment? Do you put that into the cable as well, or do you put that in CTV?

Kyle Roberts: No, we don't put the virtual one in there, no. We're only putting in the linear side. It always gets a little murky there because cable breaks out into an addressable component. There's a programmatic component to it now. 

Those are a little trickier to track, but we'll throw that stuff into the CTV bucket.

Tim Hanlon: Interesting. Okay. So let me ask you this last question and I wanna have you back at some point, maybe closer to elections, maybe September, October or so, because I got a ton of other questions that I think our audience is really gonna be interested in. But the sort of specific thing is when does this ever stop? Will it be forever increasing? We know the Citizen United ruling in 2010 is a watershed and it certainly threw a ton of fuel into the political spending fire. There's another case in front of the Supreme Court now that could even take a few more guardrails off and allow some more unlimited-ness, if you will, in spending.

I guess the twofold question in there is, what's driving the increase in money given the still limited amount of seats that are available every cycle? And is it ever-growing, and do you ever see any environment where the spending will cool off? It just seems like it's gonna continue to go up and up, but I don't know.

The law of gravity seems to, I don't know. It's gotta come in at some point, no? 

Kyle Roberts: Yeah, it's a great question. Like I told you, we're looking at a 30% bump just over the last four years. So where does it stop? And you had mentioned the Supreme Court one about the guardrails coming off.

That one is a little bit different because I don't believe it will necessarily be... It might be a little bit more money into the environment to the tune of 100 to 200 million. It could be that, okay? Because it might open up another party committee that could get involved, what's gonna happen is the party committees will be able to give money directly to the campaigns, and the campaigns will be able to spend it.

So there's a new source of campaign dollars, okay? However, right now those party committees have that money and they spend it anyway. They just spend it through independent expenditure and not through direct coordination. So it could open up a little bit more. We could see that. But do you see this ending?

It was funny. Like, where did the whole thing unlock? There's just certain key points along the line. And you think about the McCain-Feingold Act, which really tried to limit all of these dollars, but it had the opposite effect. And it removed a lot of power from the actual political system, from the party committees. I think McCain and Feingold, they thought that they could, if you removed all those dollars from those committees, from the parties, it would then stop all the influence in politics, but it's really had the opposite effect, and it's created this entire outside industry.

So that's one thing, right? That's one component. And with Citizens United and all these other court decisions, I'm not a lawyer, so I don't know the whole legality of it, but you could see how it plays out. Since that decision the money has only increased. The legislation tried to have the opposite effect.

It obviously didn't work. Okay, you have that. And the second thing is you have the closeness of, really since 2016, the House has been, you don't see more than a couple of seat majority on either side in the House. So because of the closeness of it, I think, both of the funding sides feel like if I just give a little bit more and a little bit more of this, it increases the likelihood that you can switch the balance of power.

I think because of the closeness of the whole thing it also ignites more dollars within it. And, you look at the Senate, okay, it's a six-seat difference right now. But that's not that large given there's easily two to three seats that could go, and it could shrink the Senate majority right now.

Unlikely, but there certainly are scenarios I think that people could play out where people feel like it could be more competitive. However I just think because of the legal mechanisms and what they tried to do and how it failed, and also because of the closeness of the whole things, it just continues to drive so much in the environment.

And advertising in politics now is just such a standard thing. You also have this other component within it, which is just the business side of it, Tim. You have a lot of companies developing sophisticated products, sophisticated offerings to help again, motivate new segments of voters, ignite certain segments of voters in order to switch elections.

Just go look at just in 2024 in the presidential, what was the margin in Michigan? It's a really important state in the electoral college. 0.7%, 0.3%, something like that. It's very tight numbers here. Arizona, Nevada very close. And so I think it's gonna drive more and more dollars just due to the closeness of the whole thing and the current legal structure. So that's my read on that whole thing over time. 

Tim Hanlon: Yeah. So the rapid question then is, I guess in some respects then, maybe many respects, that it's to the extent that political advertising money adds to the bottom line. This is a bright spot in an otherwise, I think, challenged local media landscape for at least for the time being, no?

Kyle Roberts: I agree with you on that. We didn't touch on the non-political side of it. It's interesting, there's always this talk of broadcast being dead. Actually, local broadcast is not dead. It's still king in the local markets, and it's still a very large impression base.

We just released a study on this too a few weeks ago, Local CTV we called it, but when you look back when did it happen? When did CTV, national CTV eclipse national broadcast? What? Maybe 12 months ago?. It hasn't eclipsed it in the local markets, though.

The broadcasters still own the local markets. Now, are they making more money than ever? No. They're definitely challenged, and we can see in our data that there's certainly concern around the revenue. You can see that there's challenges in growing their revenue. It's consistent.

You're seeing two to three percent a quarter. You see that publicly, but we see it too and also in the data that we collect. But where is the increase? I think the real growth in local is on the CTV side right now, but it's still only about 20% of the impression base.

Broadcast and cable really still own the other piece. This is where I saw Matt Hodgkiss the other night. I think this is a good play for them because they've got the local CTV. They own that market, and that's a solid market because that's a growth area.

And I think all the other DSPs are... He's ahead of them, Jim [Wilson]'s ahead of them right now, and so that's a good spot for him. But working with the broadcasters to offer the CTV extensions and build the incremental reach I think that is the growth area in media over the next four or five years.

Tim Hanlon: Yeah, I think it's a very good point, and it's one we'll end on here, is that I think though structurally there still has, there's a bit of a ways to go, maybe distracted by the two-year cycle of political spend, where the CTV thing has to be looked upon more or less an add-on to the linear buy and more of just as a fundamental component of an overall buy.

And that's a mindset shift and a structural shift that broadcasters are truly not at yet. And I think with all due respect, I think this avalanche of political money that comes in every two years distracts them from maybe doing some of the harder work to get there. That's my opinion.

Kyle Roberts: Yeah, that could be. I gave a talk the other day to a group of broadcasters, and my talk to them was I don't know how familiar you are with the ACR data, Tim, but it's a very powerful tool to unlock the broadcast story.

Tim Hanlon: Sure. 

Kyle Roberts: And when you're working with the other measurement systems for years and years and years, it's hard to think outside of that box. But boy, ACR could really help tell a different story for them. I was trying to give them some insights on that and how it works in the political space.

And how, again, I'm talking about persuasion, talking about activating new audiences, talking about the voter file. There's all these components in political but broadcast, it's 48% of our prediction. They're gonna have a 48% share. It's still holding steady. Why? Because it's a large impression page.

It still does drive reach. And I only talked about the front part of politics. The other part is all the polling that happens, and broadcast really still does. When you are on broadcast, it still does drive those poll numbers. It is real, and that's why the dollars still show up there, because the data still supports it.

But I don't think the broadcasters really understand that as well, and I think if they used more ACR data, they'd have much greater clarity and much greater confidence when they're talking to agencies and buyers about its impact. They just don't have that story down. I think it's an important one for them to tell.

Tim Hanlon: We're gonna leave it right there. Many more questions I had for Kyle, but we indeed will try our very best to have him back as the political hijinks of 2026 get closer and closer to election day in November. And so many other questions I've got and we will dig into those then.

In the meantime, though, I highly encourage you to check out the adimpact.com website where not only will you learn all about what they do and how they measure and all the intelligence behind advertising in the political realm, but also a chance for you to download their current report, which is intriguing reading, to say the least.

It is their latest update to their annual political projection report. And as you heard, the numbers are being re-estimated upwards. And just to understand where and how those numbers will affect perhaps your bottom lines in the local broadcast space or radio or cable or CTV you will just absolutely be overwhelmed with the goodness that this report delivers.

And again, that website is adimpact.com. And our thanks again to Kyle for the chat. Thank you, of course, for joining us and of course the merry friends and neighbors that help put this monstrosity together for you each and every week. In particular Melissa Hourigan and Jason Damata, we thank them from TVREV.

We thank, of course, our sponsors and our friends at Madhive inclusive of CEO and chief cook and bottle washer there, Jim Wilson, and of course our esteemed producer and editor extraordinaire. His name, of course, is the great Jerry Payne. Thank you for your audio excellence this week. All right.

Thanks again for joining us, and we'll see you again next week In the Vicinity. See you.