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Every election cycle, political campaigns compete with nonpolitical advertisers for the same inventory—driving up costs, limiting availability, and creating brand safety challenges. In 2026, that pressure is set to reach new heights.
The 2026 midterm elections are on track to be the most expensive midterms in US history. Political ad spending this cycle is projected to reach $10.8 billion, a 20%-plus increase over the 2022 midterms’ $8.9 billion and nearly on par with the $11.2 billion spent during the 2024 presidential cycle.
The forces driving that spending are significant. Control of both chambers of Congress is up for grabs, with 35 Senate seats in play, including special elections in Florida and Ohio. All 435 House seats will be contested, and a record number of House members are not seeking reelection, creating open-seat races where neither candidate benefits from incumbency. And with a deeply unpopular president, a war started without congressional authorization, and rocketing gas prices setting the backdrop for the cycle, the political environment is primed for aggressive spending on both sides.
For nonpolitical advertisers, this translates to tighter inventory, higher CPMs, platform-specific restrictions, and heightened brand safety concerns across channels. That complexity is compounded by challenges resulting from a fragmented media environment and the rise of AI-generated content. Here’s what marketers need to know heading into peak political spending:
Key Takeaways:
During the 2024 election cycle, political ad spending totaled $11.2 billion, with the presidential race alone accounting for $3.2 billion. Without that top-of-ticket race in 2026, spending will concentrate more heavily on congressional and gubernatorial contests—especially in the states and media markets where those races are most competitive.
On the Senate side, spending is projected to hit $2.8 billion, slightly surpassing the 2024 record. Georgia, Maine, Michigan, New Hampshire, and North Carolina are the cycle’s most closely watched races, with multiple contests likely to surpass $500 million in ad investment. States like Iowa, Nebraska, Ohio, and Texas could also attract significant spending as Democrats pursue pickup opportunities against a 53-47 Republican majority. And the pressure is building early: Campaigns are moving up their ad timelines to secure inventory before rising demand pushes them out of competitive markets.
Spending on House races, on the other hand, is projected to reach $2.2 billion, marking the first time spending on the chamber will exceed the $2 billion mark. With competitive seats concentrated in the New York and Los Angeles media markets—12 of the projected 40 competitive seats sit in those two designated market areas (DMAs)—nonpolitical advertisers in those regions will likely feel outsized pressure.
Gubernatorial spending is expected to hit $1.95 billion, with open seats in Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin driving substantial activity in those states. Arizona, Nevada, and New Jersey are also projected to see significant gubernatorial ad spending, with New Jersey’s race alone expected to more than triple its 2021 investment. And downballot spending, driven by ballot propositions and state legislative races, will account for 36% of all political ad spending, representing $3.9 billion.
The bottom line for nonpolitical advertisers is that political spending in 2026 will not be distributed evenly across the country. It will cluster in specific states, specific DMAs, and specific channels.
Political advertising follows a predictable cadence. Historical data shows that roughly 50% of a cycle’s political dollars run in the 30 days before Election Day, with about 25% concentrated in the final 10 days. Early voting may push some of that spending slightly earlier in 2026, but the Labor Day-to-Election Day window will remain the period of highest intensity.
Sports programming will intensify the pressure. The FIFA World Cup, hosted in the US, Canada, and Mexico from June through July, will drive significant demand for sports-adjacent inventory, particularly on CTV and streaming platforms. That demand will overlap with the early stages of general election spending, which means CPMs in sports-adjacent inventory could start climbing well before the traditional September-through-November political window. Then, from Labor Day through Election Day, college football and the NFL will overlap directly with peak political ad spending. And with political advertisers increasingly using live sports as a targeting proxy—reaching voters in specific states and DMAs based on the games they watch—nonpolitical advertisers competing for the same inventory in battleground states should expect particularly elevated CPMs during that window and plan their sports buys accordingly.
Geographically, the hottest markets will track directly with competitive races. States projected to see the highest total political spending include California ($1.1 billion), Michigan ($936 million), Georgia ($757 million), North Carolina ($669 million), and Texas ($556 million). Advertisers with heavy presence in those states should plan for elevated CPMs and limited premium inventory throughout Q3 and Q4.
Broadcast television still commands the largest share of political ad spend, at just under 50%. But that share is effectively flat from the last cycle, and broadcast revenue is actually declining slightly from 2024. The growth story is in CTV.
Connected TV is the only media channel projected to see increased spending over the 2024 presidential cycle. Spending on the channel is projected to reach $2.4 billion in 2026, up from $2.34 billion in 2024, and accounting for 23% of total political ad spend.
Several factors are accelerating this shift. First, cord-cutting continues to reshape the television market. Streaming captured 47.5% of all TV viewing in December 2025, while cable’s share continued to decline. As audiences—including older demographics who have historically been the most cable-loyal—continue migrating to streaming platforms, political advertisers are following them to CTV. At the same time, CTV’s targeting capabilities allow political advertisers to reach specific geographies and demographics with precision that broadcast cannot match.
For nonpolitical advertisers, this creates a compounding inventory challenge. Major CTV platforms like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video do not currently accept political advertising, which pushes political dollars more heavily into platforms that do: Hulu, Roku, YouTube, and others. That concentration effect means CPMs on those platforms will spike and inventory could be tight, particularly in competitive markets during the September-through-November window. On the flip side, those same political-ad-free platforms represent inventory that nonpolitical advertisers can access without competing against campaign dollars at all.
Beyond linear and connected TV, digital spending on social platforms like Facebook, Google, Snapchat, and X will account for an estimated 13% of total political spend this cycle, down from 15% during the 2024 presidential cycle. That decline is consistent with typical midterm cycles, where social media and digital as a whole command a smaller share of spend without a presidential race on the ballot. Still, nonpolitical advertisers in battleground states should expect increased competition for display and online video inventory. And as political content—both paid and organic—saturates social feeds in the weeks before Election Day, ad environment quality and brand adjacency becomes harder to control.
Audio, meanwhile, remains one of the most underutilized channels in the political media mix, despite consumers spending a significant and growing share of their media time with audio content. For nonpolitical brands looking for less congested environments during peak political season, programmatic audio may offer an efficient alternative.
With so many different channel- and platform-specific considerations, omnichannel visibility is particularly important in 2026. Advertisers who can see and adjust all of these dynamics from a single vantage point—shifting budgets from high-pressure CTV inventory to less contested audio or display, for example— will be better positioned to make proactive, considered decisions rather than scrambling to adjust when pricing spikes hit.
Brand safety is a perennial concern during election years. In 2026, the continued rise of AI-generated political content adds a new layer of complexity for political and nonpolitical advertisers alike.
Deepfake political ads are already running in midterm campaigns. In March 2026, the National Republican Senatorial Committee released an 85-second deepfake video of James Talarico, the Democratic Senate nominee in Texas, depicting a realistic but entirely fabricated version of the candidate reading old social media posts directly into the camera. Similar AI-generated attack ads have appeared in the Georgia Senate race and in state and local contests across the country.
There is no federal law governing the widespread use of AI in political advertising, and while 26 states have enacted some form of deepfake disclosure legislation, enforcement remains limited and laws vary widely in scope. At the same time, social media platforms like Meta and X have rolled back professional fact-checking programs in favor of community-based moderation, which can be slower to catch synthetic content, if it catches it at all.
For nonpolitical advertisers, this means the content environment around political news coverage, political ads, and social media will be more volatile and less predictable in 2026. The specific risks will vary by channel and by advertiser. Consider a healthcare brand whose display ads unexpectedly appear alongside coverage of an abortion ballot initiative, or a family-oriented retailer whose pre-roll video ads run ahead of an AI-generated political attack ad on YouTube. The brand safety risk is meaningful even when the adjacency is accidental. Three-quarters of consumers feel less favorably toward brands that advertise on sites that spread misinformation, and ads that avoid risky political content see a 32% lower cost per conversion and significantly higher success rate than those that appear alongside it.
Brand safety controls—including site-level block lists, keyword exclusions, and contextual targeting—will be critical, particularly for display and online video placements where ads appear directly alongside editorial and user-generated content. CTV presents fewer adjacency risks because ads appear within streaming content rather than alongside it. Agility is a major competitive advantage considering the brand safety risks that accompany the midterms. Advertisers who can quickly adjust placements, update exclusion lists, and monitor brand safety across channels from a single, unified platform will be better equipped to respond when conditions shift—whether a deepfake goes viral, a controversial ad surfaces, or a political story dominates a news cycle.
Navigating a $10.8 billion political advertising cycle requires both planning and flexibility. Here are practical considerations for the months ahead:
The 2026 midterms will test nonpolitical advertisers' ability to maintain reach and performance in a historically expensive and complex media environment. With a record amount of political spending projected to flood broadcast TV, CTV, and digital channels, the pressure will be acute in battleground states and high-profile DMAs from Labor Day through Election Day.
What makes this cycle particularly challenging is the convergence of multiple pressures at once: record midterm spending, a shifting CTV landscape where political dollars are concentrating on a subset of platforms, AI-generated content complicating brand safety, and major sports programming overlapping directly with peak political season. Advertisers who treat these as isolated issues rather than compounding ones risk being caught off guard by pricing spikes and inventory shortages that are already predictable.
The post-election window is worth planning for as well. November through December historically offers favorable pricing as political dollars exit the market. Brands that build their Q3 and Q4 pacing with that rebound in mind can recover reach and efficiency quickly.
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For more on how political advertising is shaping this year’s cycle, check out The Ultimate Guide to Political Advertising in 2026.
Key Takeaways:
AI is transforming how consumers search online and what paid media can accomplish within those environments.
This transformation is resulting in three key shifts that marketers must understand to invest effectively in paid search:
For advertisers, understanding how to strategize around each of these shifts is essential to building a paid search strategy that holds up in an LLM-powered environment.
The search results page has always been a place where advertisers vie for attention, but AI is changing the terms of that competition. AI Overviews now dominate above-the-fold real estate on Google for about half of all queries, pushing paid and organic listings further down the page. As users opt to scan AI-generated summaries first and scroll less as a result, there are fewer moments for them to see and act upon your ads.
This attention compression directly affects paid search performance, with recent research finding that the presence of an AIO correlates with a 58% lower CTR for the top-ranking page. As advertisers compete for fewer available clicks, these changes could drive up CPCs as well.
For agencies and internal marketing teams, it's critical to proactively communicate the context of these changes to stakeholders, so that declining CTRs and rising CPCs are understood in context rather than treated as performance failures.
Not all search intent is affected equally by AI. AIOs are showing up predominantly for the upper-funnel, research-driven queries that users rely on to learn, compare, and evaluate before making a final decision. In fact, 99.2% of the keywords that trigger AIOs are informational in intent.
This means that it has become more difficult for paid search to deliver the upper-funnel discoverability and efficient clicks it is known for. There are also emerging implications for programmatic, as fewer impressions become available from key publishers whose organic traffic is being absorbed by AI-powered search experiences.
Action- and decision-oriented queries, however, remain largely unaffected—which presents a clear opportunity for search advertisers. Lower-funnel, intent-driven keywords should be prioritized accordingly.
Perhaps the most important mindset shift for search advertisers right now is reframing the value paid search provides. As AI search increasingly resolves questions without site visits, paid media will drive fewer clicks. But that doesn’t necessarily mean those investments are driving less value.
Clicks have long been advertisers' primary focus because they’re measurable, but paid search has always contributed to outcomes beyond that immediate action. Paid search-driven brand exposure drives recall and brand trust, influences later decisions and return visits, and impacts whether a brand makes it into a consumer’s consideration set at all.
Of course, measuring the impact of paid search in this way is more complex than traditional paid search attribution. As the causality between paid search exposure and action becomes harder to track, teams will need to lean more heavily on marketing mix modeling and multi-touch attribution to connect paid media investment to business outcomes.
AI’s impact on paid media performance is already significant: Attention is more compressed, different intents are leading to different outcomes, and the click-based model of demonstrating paid media value is under pressure.
Advertisers who understand these dynamics and adjust their strategies, benchmarks, and measurement approaches accordingly will be far better positioned to drive results from paid search investments as the search landscape continues to evolve.
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Looking for more insights on the future of search engine marketing? Explore everything marketers need to know about the shifting landscape by watching our recent webinar: Is Search Totally F**ked? What Do We Do Now?.
In this episode, former Discover media and audience strategy leader Clare Liston joins host Noor Naseer to break down how top marketers actually evaluate adtech and martech partners.
From avoiding “shiny object” syndrome to pressure-testing vendors with direct questions, Clare shares a practical framework for choosing tech that drives real business outcomes. She unpacks why most adoption is reactive, how to think about ROI within working media, why human credibility matters more than jargon, and more.
Key Takeaways:
Marketing and advertising teams are increasingly turning to AI to overcome a wide range of constraints, including limited budgets, resources, and time.
To date, the technology appears to be delivering on at least some of its potential, with nearly three-quarters of marketing and advertising professionals saying it has made them moderately to significantly more efficient at their jobs. But while adoption is accelerating, many organizations are still figuring out where AI can deliver the most meaningful impact.
In 2026, the clearest opportunities for AI-driven impact in digital advertising stem from five key areas: creative and content generation, process streamlining, media buying and optimization, media strategy, and campaign measurement.
Tapping into AI for ideation and to generate content and creative assets is one of the most widely adopted use cases in marketing today. A Basis survey found ideation and brainstorming to be the most popular use of AI among advertising and marketing professionals, while drafting content and creative assets ranked third. Teams are applying AI across a range of tasks, from streamlining internal communications to drafting marketing content to producing digital ads.
When it comes to generating ad creative, AI is creating powerful new opportunities to scale personalized creative more efficiently. “Marketers should evaluate their messaging and creative strategies to find where AI can unlock scalable personalization and variation that was previously limited by time and cost,” says April Weeks, Chief Investment and Media Officer at Basis.
That being said, the involvement of human employees remains an important step in developing effective creative and content, with three-quarters of industry professionals believing that AI-generated content does not yet match the standard of human-generated work. AI is best used as a complement to human-led work, helping teams produce more content in less time while enabling more tailored outputs at scale.
Marketing and advertising teams are also widely leveraging AI to streamline complex processes: According to one survey, it’s the fourth most popular use case of generative AI among industry professionals today. As teams look for ways to reduce manual work and improve operational efficiency, close to two-thirds of marketers and advertisers say their organizations have invested in technologies that automate or streamline processes within the past year.
This is a critical piece of an effective AI strategy, as solutions that are tacked on to existing workflows rather than thoughtfully integrated into them will likely exacerbate existing tech stack sprawl. High-performing teams are nearly three times as likely as others are to report that their organizations have completely restructured individual workflows with AI in mind. The shift from tacking on point solutions to rethinking entire workflows is what enables marketing teams to achieve efficiency gains with AI.
Another key consideration is data governance and unification, as fragmented data can be a major barrier to both workflow efficiency and effective AI adoption. Unified, well-governed data not only streamlines the workflows that feed AI tools, but also improves the quality of their outputs. To move towards data readiness, marketers should audit their tech stacks with data unification in mind, seeking out platforms and tools that centralize data sources, enforce consistent governance standards, and create a single source of truth that both their teams and their AI tools can reliably draw from.
AI has long played a role in media buying and optimization, but recent advances are enabling marketers to improve how they allocate and adjust their investments. “We’re moving toward a place where buyers will be able to move much more quickly, because AI will be surfacing data signals and insights faster and accelerating tasks like predictive optimization and forecasting,” says Weeks.
Already, AI-powered tools can process dozens of real-time signals to inform bidding decisions and shift budget across channels as performance evolves. This allows teams to respond more quickly and drive ROI by making more informed adjustments over the course of a campaign. AI also enables more advanced audience targeting, helping marketers surface overlooked segments and uncover new audiences via approaches like building synthetic audience personas.
Personalization at scale—a persistent challenge in media strategy—is another area where AI is opening new doors. Studies show that 71% of customers expect personalized interactions, and 76% get frustrated when they don’t happen. And when applied effectively, AI-driven personalization has been shown to improve customer satisfaction by 15% to 20%, drive revenue increases of 5% to 8%, and lower the cost to serve by up to 30%.
Adoption, however, has not kept pace. Only one-third of marketers are using predictive AI for media buying and planning, while roughly a quarter are applying generative AI in this area. That gap between potential and adoption represents a clear competitive opportunity. To capitalize, advertisers should ensure they’re using advertising platforms that offer AI-enhanced media buying and optimization, prioritizing those that have these tools integrated into their core workflows.
For advertisers eager to achieve meaningful differentiation with AI, media strategy presents significant opportunities.
Over half of businesses cite shifting consumer preferences as their top challenge. Yet only around one quarter of marketers say they are using AI as part of their media strategy development process.
AI can help marketers better keep up with these shifts by enabling deeper, faster insights.
“AI is creating new opportunities for media strategists to synthesize large volumes of data and uncover insights more efficiently and comprehensively,” says Weeks. “It can take tasks that were once highly manual for advertisers and execute them faster, using a broader set of data.”
Most current use cases for AI across media strategy fall into three core areas:
Together, these capabilities can help marketers better understand their customers and inform a more effective media strategy. Emerging tools are also beginning to extend beyond insights into execution. For example, there are now AI solutions that can turn media briefs into full omnichannel media strategies spanning both the open web and walled gardens, helping agencies and in-house teams reduce manual planning work and move more quickly from strategy to activation.
Campaign measurement remains an under-utilized AI use case poised to become central in the years ahead.
AI excels at parsing, organizing, and analyzing large data sets, and many marketing and advertising teams today are swimming in more campaign data than they can effectively use. Because of the fragmentation of that data, marketers are often weighed down by the manual processes necessary to unify data across platforms, structure it for analysis, and extract meaningful insights in a timely manner. AI can help streamline that workflow, making it faster and more scalable.
AI can also assist with tasks like running regression analyses for performance forecasting based on historical spend and conversion data, helping teams move from raw data to actionable insight more efficiently.
“As AI becomes more embedded in marketers’ workflows, it will increasingly shape how teams approach reporting, insights, and analytics,” says Weeks. “That shift is already underway, but adoption and maturity vary widely across organizations.”
What will separate the agencies and brands who effectively adopt AI from those who don’t? According to Weeks, the companies that succeed will be those who lean into AI and understand the importance of data governance and data hygiene.
In addition to prioritizing data readiness, marketing and advertising teams that thoughtfully implement AI across content generation, process streamlining, media buying, strategy, and measurement will be better positioned to move faster, make smarter decisions, and focus their human talent on the work that matters most.
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Want more insights into how AI is reshaping digital advertising strategy? We surveyed marketing and advertising professionals from top agencies and brands to understand how they are adopting AI, where they are seeing results, and more. Check out AI and the Future of Marketing for all the top takeaways.
YouTube has evolved from a simple video sharing platform into the most powerful digital advertising channel for political campaigns. With over 76% of registered US voters using the platform weekly and the platform generating an average of more than $776 million in advertising revenue per week, understanding how to leverage YouTube effectively is now essential for political advertisers.
When examining the landscape of social video platforms accepting political advertising in 2026, YouTube stands virtually alone at scale. While platforms like Netflix and Microsoft's Bing have opted out of political ads entirely, YouTube continues to offer unparalleled reach across every demographic group.
The numbers tell a compelling story. This election cycle is projected to see almost $11 billion in total spending, with connected TV capturing a significant portion and YouTube commanding the largest share of that investment. The platform's reach extends beyond traditional metrics. A single video from a top creator like Mr. Beast can generate viewership equivalent to an NBA Finals game or Monday Night Football broadcast.
Perhaps most significantly, TV screens have now surpassed mobile and desktop as the primary consumption device for YouTube content in the United States. This shift transforms YouTube from a digital-only platform into a genuine broadcast alternative with superior targeting capabilities.
YouTube offers several distinct inventory types, each serving specific campaign objectives:
This represents the core YouTube advertising experience, available across all channels and content types. Advertisers can access this inventory through real-time bidding, making it the most flexible and scalable option for political campaigns.
YouTube Select provides access to premium content from top creators and brands. The platform organizes this inventory into curated lineups including top artists, popular creators, sports content, entertainment, and families. For political advertisers, the broadcast lineup is particularly valuable as it provides access to YouTube TV inventory.
This premium placement requires advance reservations, especially during high-demand periods. Working with a Google Premier Partner can unlock discounted rates not available through standard channels.
YouTube TV allows political advertisers to place video content within live television and DVR environments as traditional commercials. This extends broadcast strategies with greater efficiency and preliminary audience targeting capabilities. During peak political season, particularly September through November when live sports dominate viewership, this inventory becomes especially competitive.
Political advertisers can choose from multiple ad formats, each optimized for different strategic goals:
These ads allow viewers to skip after five seconds. The strategic advantage is clear: if a viewer skips your ad, you pay nothing. Those first five to 10 seconds before the skip option appears represent free impressions. This format works exceptionally well for awareness campaigns where broad reach matters more than guaranteed completion.
When your message requires full delivery, non-skippable ads ensure viewers watch the entire spot. This category includes bumper ads (six seconds) and longer formats up to 60 seconds or more. While YouTube recommends standard lengths of six, 15, 30, and 60 seconds, the platform accommodates custom lengths like 38 or 48-second spots without requiring editing.
This relatively new capability allows campaigns to tell stories across multiple ads served in sequence. If a viewer engages with the first ad, they'll see the second, then the third. If they skip, the system can route them to alternative content based on regular targeting parameters. This approach works particularly well for candidate introduction campaigns that build narrative over time.
Unlike in-stream ads that run within video content, in-feed ads appear in search results, on the YouTube homepage, and as recommended videos. Users must actively click to watch, creating a triple qualification: they see the ad, choose to click, and then watch the content. While this can command premium pricing, it delivers highly qualified views from genuinely interested voters.
As YouTube's answer to TikTok and Instagram Reels, Shorts represents rapidly growing inventory. While horizontal video ads can run in Shorts, vertical creative performs significantly better and delivers a superior user experience. Campaigns already running vertical content on other platforms can easily extend that investment to YouTube Shorts.
YouTube and YouTube Music have become major podcast players. Audio ads allow campaigns to reach listeners consuming podcast content, including popular shows from NPR and other major publishers. This format also provides a solution for campaigns without video assets, allowing static images with audio overlays to run in video environments.
This newer format displays image-based ads when users pause YouTube content on television screens. After a 10-second pause, the ad appears and remains visible until the viewer resumes playback. Purchased on a CPM basis, pause ads offer another touchpoint for reinforcing campaign messages in living room environments.
YouTube advertising operates through two primary campaign structures, each optimized for different objectives.
Designed for persuasion, video reach campaigns excel at delivering candidate biography content and contrast ads highlighting differences with opponents. These campaigns are purchased on a dynamic CPM (cost per thousand impressions) basis, with campaign managers optimizing bids to balance efficiency with quality audience exposure.
Built for consideration, video views campaigns work exceptionally well for get-out-the-vote initiatives. The key difference lies in the buying model: Advertisers only pay when viewers complete the entire video (up to 30 seconds). For a three-minute video, cost is incurred at the 30-second mark. This approach maximizes impressions while ensuring payment only for engaged viewing.
Recommended ad lengths vary by campaign type:
| Campaign Type | Recommended Lengths | Best Use Case |
|---|---|---|
| Video Reach | 15s, 30s, 60s | Persuasion, candidate bios, contrast ads |
| Video Views | 15s, 30s | Consideration, GOTV, issue education |
YouTube's targeting options differ significantly from other programmatic platforms, with specific restrictions political advertisers must understand.
Demographics are limited to age, gender, and household income. Third-party audience segments and first-party data onboarding (including voter files commonly used in Connected TV campaigns) are not available on YouTube.
Geographic targeting supports zip codes, cities, DMAs, states, and countries. Importantly for down-ballot races, congressional district targeting remains available.
The majority of YouTube targeting relies on contextual signals:
For example, a Second Amendment-focused candidate might target channels discussing firearms and hunting. An environmentally-focused campaign, meanwhile, could target content about green energy and electric vehicles. Keyword targeting works similarly to search advertising, reaching voters actively seeking information on specific topics.
YouTube does not allow targeting based on:
These restrictions reflect Google's approach to maintaining trust and transparency in political advertising while complying with federal and state regulations.
Google defines election ads broadly. Any content promoting current or potential candidates, political parties at any level, or ballot measures, initiatives, and propositions falls under political advertising restrictions.
Before running political ads, accounts must complete Google's verification process. This requires a few pieces of information, including:
Working with a Google Premier Partner streamlines this process. These partners represent the top 1% of spending brands and agencies, providing direct access to human support rather than automated bot reviews. This becomes critical for quick-turn campaign needs and troubleshooting disapproved ads.
All political ads appear in Google's Ads Transparency Center at adstransparency.google.com. This public database allows anyone to search for competitors, view their creative, see when ads ran, and access approximate spending levels. Smart campaigns use this resource for competitive intelligence and budget planning.
Political advertising costs on YouTube increased 20-50% during peak periods in 2024, driven by high demand and the crowded advertising environment. These premiums intensified during early Q4 when political spending overlapped with traditional brand advertising for the holiday season.
YouTube Select and YouTube TV inventory require advance planning. In previous cycles, YouTube TV inventory has completely sold out regardless of budget, leaving late-moving campaigns without access. Securing premium placements well in advance of go-live dates is essential.
Standard YouTube auction inventory never sells out due to the platform's massive scale. While costs may fluctuate based on demand, campaigns can always access this inventory even for quick-turn needs.
Account verification should happen as early as possible, ideally before campaign launch. While expedited processing is sometimes available, building buffer time prevents delays when launching time-sensitive messaging or responding to campaign developments.
While less common in political advertising, two campaign types deserve mention for specific use cases:
These campaigns drive consideration across YouTube, Google Discover, and Gmail. They require conversion tracking implementation but can effectively build interest in candidates or initiatives when measurable website actions matter.
Performance Max, or "PMax," runs across all Google inventory, optimizing toward specific conversion goals like newsletter signups or volunteer registrations. This approach works when driving trackable actions matters more than broad awareness.
Both formats require website tracking tags and work best when clear conversion events can be defined and measured.
Success on YouTube requires understanding both the platform's capabilities and its constraints. Here are some tips for achieving success when advertising on YouTube this election season:
Complete account verification immediately. Reserve premium inventory for critical flight dates, especially during September through November when live sports and peak political activity converge.
Don't rely on a single ad type. Combine skippable ads for efficient reach with non-skippable formats for guaranteed message delivery. Layer in-feed ads to capture active searchers and shorts to reach mobile-first voters.
The same 30-second spot that works on broadcast may underperform on YouTube if it doesn't capture attention in the first five seconds. Test multiple creative approaches and let performance data guide budget allocation.
Without access to voter file targeting, contextual signals become crucial. Invest time identifying channels, topics, and keywords that align with your target voter's content consumption habits.
Use the Ads Transparency Center to track opponent spending and messaging. This intelligence informs budget decisions and creative strategy.
Build budgets assuming 20-50% cost increases during peak periods. This prevents mid-campaign budget shortfalls when competition intensifies.
YouTube's political advertising requirements, verification processes, and optimization strategies differ significantly from other platforms. Partner with teams holding Google Premier Partner status and specific political advertising experience.
YouTube represents the most scalable, targetable video advertising platform available to political campaigns in 2026. While restrictions on audience targeting require different strategic approaches than other digital channels, the platform's reach across every demographic group and its dominance in both mobile and living room viewing make it indispensable.
Success requires understanding the full toolkit: From skippable in-stream ads delivering efficient reach, to YouTube TV placements extending broadcast strategies, to contextual targeting replacing voter file approaches, to verification processes enabling compliant campaigns.
The campaigns that master these elements early, secure premium inventory in advance, and optimize creative for YouTube's unique environment will gain significant advantages in the crowded 2026 election cycle.
Whether you're managing a congressional campaign, a down-ballot race or a national initiative, Basis has the expertise and technology to help you win in 2026.
Basis provides political advertisers a unified, omnichannel platform to execute precise, targeted media strategies across YouTube, CTV, streaming audio, programmatic, and beyond. And our team of experienced political advertising specialists understands the verification requirements, timing pressures, and platform nuances that can make or break a campaign.
Explore Basis’s political advertising capabilities at basis.com/political-advertising-2026.
In this episode of Adtech Unfiltered, Malorie Benjamin, Chief Transformation Officer at Dixon Schwabl + Company, joins host Noor Naseer to unpack how the agency pitch process is evolving.
She shares how data, AI, and predictive modeling are reshaping the way agencies approach new business, why many clients are still stuck on last-click attribution, and how transparency can build trust in programmatic buying. Malorie also explores the growing pressure on CMOs to adopt AI, how agencies can simplify complex tech for clients, and what truly sets agency pitches apart today. The discussion offers a candid look at what it takes to win modern agency pitches.
Humans are wired to search.
With billions of search queries per day, marketers have long known where and how to find their audiences. Now with the rise of generative engines and AI, the search landscape is facing its biggest upheaval in decades. Traditional search, long the backbone of digital strategy, is being rapidly replaced and reshaped by generative engine optimization (GEO), fragmented user journeys, and new discovery ecosystems.
In this webinar, Robert Kurtz, Basis’ Strategic Business Outcomes Partner, joins host Noor Naseer, VP of Media Innovations + Technology, to discuss the past, present, and future of search. They highlight immediate threats to legacy search approaches and inspire strategies for brands, marketers, and advertisers to reclaim visibility and influence.
Key Takeaways:
After years of uncertainty, TikTok's sale to a group of US investors has finally given TikTok advertisers something they haven't had in a while: stability.
For years, regulatory volatility kept many advertisers from making long-term commitments on the platform. After all, why build a strategy around an app that might eventually cease to exist in the US? Now that the threat of a ban is off the table and the sale is finalized, advertisers can plan with more confidence than they’ve had in years.
Still, this new era of TikTok comes with unanswered questions that advertisers would do well to keep tabs on. Potential changes to the app’s famed algorithm, new privacy concerns, the evolution of TikTok commerce, and the development of AI-led advertising features stand out as the most important areas to watch in the coming months.
TikTok's algorithm is, in many ways, the true heart of TikTok itself. It's what fueled the app's rise to prominence and what keeps users so deeply engaged (see: “I built this algorithm brick by brick”). As such, whether the algorithm will change under new ownership has become one of the biggest questions for users and advertisers alike.
The good news? The owners are incentivized to keep things as similar as possible to not rock the boat with users and advertisers. Still, even subtle changes could alter the user experience in meaningful ways—and some algorithm changes are essentially baked into the deal itself. The app’s new owners (a group called TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC) have licensed the algorithm to Oracle, and stated that they will “retrain, test, and update the content recommendation algorithm on US user data.”
Major content changes seem unlikely in the short term, but significant questions remain as to how this group of investors will influence what people see in their TikTok feeds. This concern isn’t lost on users: Shortly after the sale, many reported signs of content suppression on the app. Perception matters too: Whether changes are happening or not, if users feel like their feeds are shifting, that could affect usership and engagement. User sentiment is already in flux, with one recent survey finding that one-third of Gen Z users now feel they must actively train their TikTok algorithms because they’re not as personalized as they once were.
Considering this, advertisers should monitor TikTok usership and engagement over the coming months to stay abreast of any changes that may occur as a result of the algorithm’s evolution.
Algorithm uncertainty isn’t the only perception risk advertisers should track. TikTok’s new privacy policy presents another layer for advertisers to consider. The app is now collecting more user data, which has garnered privacy concerns from both users and human rights experts. Even Gen Z—the generation that drove TikTok's rise—is taking notice: 64% of Gen Z TikTok users say the sale made them more aware of their data.
This presents a potential risk for advertisers, as these privacy concerns could impact usership and engagement. As with the algorithm, the key for advertisers is to keep a close eye on how these concerns play out in the numbers.
How the commerce side of TikTok will develop under new ownership is another open question worth watching. Oracle—now a key player in TikTok's new ownership structure—has deep roots in retail commerce and supply chain management, which could have notable implications for TikTok Shop. If Oracle further integrates TikTok with new commerce solutions or introduces an Oracle commerce solution for the app, that could be a significant selling point for advertisers looking for closed-loop measurement on retail and commerce campaigns.
The flip side, though, is balance. If the platform leans too heavily into commerce at the expense of entertainment content, the user experience could suffer. Already, 79% of Gen Z TikTok users miss the early days of the app, before the surge in brand partnerships and the launch of TikTok Shop. Advertisers should monitor how that balance plays out, and whether engagement holds steady as the commerce side of the app continues to evolve.
Oracle's involvement also raises questions about where TikTok's AI-driven advertising capabilities are headed. Meta has set a high bar with campaigns that leverage AI for campaign builds, optimization, and audience targeting. Before the sale, TikTok was just scratching the surface in this area. With Oracle now in the mix, it's reasonable to expect TikTok's AI-led advertising offerings to accelerate.
If that is how things play out, creative is going to be an even bigger lever on TikTok. With AI taking on more of the campaign building and optimization work, the brands investing in UGC, influencer content, and platform-native creative will have a meaningful edge. Those that aren't will find it increasingly difficult to perform.
Overall, while there are some big question marks in the TikTok advertising space post-sale, the outlook is mostly positive. The app’s future is stable, advertising performance appears to have remained consistent, and TikTok continues to be cost-efficient relative to other social platforms, with strong conversions and CPA.
That said, the advertisers who keep a close eye on the questions outlined above—around the algorithm, privacy, commerce, and AI-led advertising—will be best positioned to navigate the platform successfully as this new chapter continues to unfold.
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AI is poised to transform more than just TikTok advertising. To see how marketing teams at leading brands and agencies are already putting it to work (and where the challenges still lie), check out AI and the Future of Marketing.
Key Takeaways:
You need to get started using programmatic buying tools, but you’ve never done it before, and you don’t know where to begin. Join the club. We get it. It’s the same reason we haven’t learned to cook for ourselves yet.
Here’s the good news: We’ve got experts at Basis who know the ins and outs of programmatic advertising. All you have to do is ask the right questions. Lucky for you, we’ve asked the basic questions and we’ve come equipped with answers—and, lucky for us, we've been assured repeatedly that there is no such thing as a dumb question.
To start: Programmatic is a very broad term. Simply put, it’s technology that automates digital media buying. This can include automating anything from rate negotiation and campaign set up to optimizations and actualizations. One of the primary buying tools you have at your disposal is a DSP.
A demand side platform (DSP) is an automated ad buying platform, where advertisers and agencies go to purchase digital ad inventory. Examples of ad inventory include banner ads on websites, mobile ads on apps and the mobile web, and in-stream video. DSPs are integrated into multiple ad exchanges.
Popular examples of DSPs include The Trade Desk, Google DV360, Amazon DSP, and Basis DSP.
DSPs use real-time bidding to purchase ad impressions automatically. Here's how the process works:
An SSP is not the same thing as a DSP, but it is similar in concept.
Supply-side platforms, or sell-side platforms (SSPs), facilitate the sale of publisher inventory through an ad exchange. SSPs offer services such as minimum bid requirements in order for the publisher to maximize how much their ad space sells for. The difference is that DSPs are for marketers and SSPs are for publishers. SSPs, like DSPs, are plugged into multiple ad exchanges.
Think of the ad exchange as the "go-between" in the automated buying world. An ad exchange is a digital marketplace that enables advertisers and publishers to buy and sell advertising space via real-time bidding (RTB). Real-time bidding (RTB) is the process of buying and selling ad impressions through instantaneous auctions that occur in milliseconds. The ad exchange announces each impression—with the inventory flowing through DSPs and SSPs—in real time and asks buyers if they are interested in buying said impression and at which price
| Platform | Definition | Who Uses It |
|---|---|---|
| DSP (Demand-Side Platform) | Automated platform for buying digital ad inventory | Advertisers and agencies |
| SSP (Supply-Side Platform) | Platform that helps publishers sell their ad inventory | Publishers |
| Ad Exchange | Digital marketplace where DSPs and SSPs connect to buy and sell ads via real-time bidding | Both buyers and sellers |
In order to understand why DSPs matter, it's important to remember where the need came from and how the ad industry operated before automated buying. Historically, if you were a media buyer at an ad agency, the buying process was facilitated through human beings—it was you (the advertisers), the publishers (website where ad will appear), an audience (the viewer of the ad), and a bunch of spreadsheets and emails going back and forth negotiating prices. This process was complicated, time-consuming, and often error-prone. DSPs allow advertisers and agencies to buy across a lot of sites at the same time—and all of this is done instantly and efficiently, usually before the webpage loads.
There are many DSPs in the programmatic world to choose from. Choosing the right DSP for you depends on a number of factors.
DSP Evaluation Checklist:
Some DSPs come with a full team of experts, offering you everything from full-service to self-service and everything in between. With Basis DSP, you'll start with a three-month platform training program, offering you an overview of programmatic, a walk-through of the interface, and best practices for campaign creation and optimization. Ongoing support is available in the form of a customer success manager and resources to keep you informed—like new feature webinars, best practice guides, and industry-leading research reports.