Complete Story
01/19/2017
Why political ad spending statistics can't be trusted
Somewhere in New York, Washington, and San Francisco, the chief revenue officer at a digital platform is sending a note to his political sales lead. It goes something like this, “The Borrell Report says $1.41538 billion was spent on campaign advertising this cycle. Why didn’t we get even 1 percent of that?”
The answer, as several political digital ad sales teams learned the hard way last year, is that trying to grab a made-up percentage of a questionable pie is a surefire recipe for leaving you hungry. That’s because tracking political digital dollars -- and by extension, projecting them -- is essentially impossible. Here’s why:
FEC expenditure reporting is almost worthless
FEC expenditure reporting is absurdly loose about naming and categorizing vendors. With the exception of California, the lack of sub-vendor reporting allows the general consultant to hire everyone else, meaning it’s difficult to tell where the funds are actually going. (This is why you rarely see oppo researcher on FEC reports.)
For example, OpenSecrets data doesn’t accurately tally the digital advertising Audience Partners, and its campaign division, CampaignGrid, sold this cycle. Nor does it account for everything our competitors sold this cycle. The same database shows just over $7.6 million for Facebook and just over $1.6 million for Google. I’ll speak for them both and say that’s not even close.
