Prior to the most recent U.S. presidential election cycle, political ad spend was projected to reach an unprecedented $10 billion in 2024. With the 2024 campaign over, the numbers revealed that a record-breaking $11 billion was poured into political campaigns throughout the year. This is a significant hike from the $9 billion spent on political campaign advertising in 2020.
The staggering $11 billion campaign spend encompasses a $3.1 billion ad investment in the presidential race between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris alone. Political ad spend on Google, including YouTube, generated at least $800m from digital political ad dollars during the 2024 election cycle — over $200m more than the 2020 cycle.
In this blog post, we put the political ad strategies of both prolific campaigners under the spotlight. We’ll analyze how they used different approaches for ad formats, targeting and engagement.
We also explore what makes a political ad effective and how to leverage the learnings from 2024 to create more relevant and successful political media strategies in 2025.
Political Ad Strategies in the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election
Advertising experts and political scientists alike have identified how prominently the 2024 presidential election cycle highlighted the differences between Trump’s and Harris’s campaigning styles. However, a notable similarity between the opposing strategies was that media buying focused heavily on intercepting viewers during their entertainment time, e.g. through CTV and OTT channels.
One of the biggest differences between the two opposing political operations was the allocation of ad spend. Trump’s campaign spent around $425 million on ads, while Harris’s operation eclipsed the Republican spend, investing over $880 million in advertising. Traditional media made up the majority of the spending in each campaign.
Let’s dig into some of the nuts and bolts of each presidential campaign to compare and contrast their political advertising tacks.
Kamala Harris
- A blanket approach – Both presidential campaigns focused attention on swing states (Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Arizona, Nevada and Wisconsin). Harris’s campaign utilized united messaging to target a broad audience, which was a contrast to Trump’s hyper-targeting.
- Popular platforms – Harris’s political operation allocated most of its spending dollars to popular platforms including Google, Facebook and Instagram, while also investing in Snapchat and TikTok to vie for young voters.
Harris’s campaign focused heavily on Facebook for its ability to foster communities, mobilize groups, nurture connections and drum up more meaningful alliances.
- Influencer marketing and celeb endorsements – As well as high-paid media spend and a sprawling door-knocking initiative, Harris’s campaign spending also included $14 million on influencer marketing and $15 million on celebrity endorsements.
Donald Trump
- Targeted localization – In contrast to Harris’s blanket approach, Trump’s digital and television ads utilized targeted segmentation and personalized messaging designed to strike chords with specific audiences.
- Less traditional platforms – Trump’s campaign placed extra effort and ad spend into two less conventional media channels: YouTube and streaming platform Twitch. Trump’s political action committee (PAC) reportedly spent $80 million on streaming ads, reaching 83% of persuadable voters.
This was for two reasons:
- To get around the targeting restrictions Meta enforces on political advertising.
- To tap into younger audiences who are generally disengaged from traditional political media.
- The X factor – X (formerly Twitter) was another digital hotspot for Republican campaigning and a key conduit for Trump’s direct, uncensored communication with supporters. X is notoriously popular amongst Trump supporters, which is why Harris’s ad dollar spend wasn’t prioritized there.
- Going hard on Google – Trump’s political operation spent $195.3m on Google ads versus £16.3m on Facebook. This mobilized a more top-funnel approach with awareness campaign tactics, leaning into the power of search ads, YouTube videos, and display networks.
Political Advertising Winners from the 2024 Election Cycle
One of the most effective ways to refine your political advertising strategy is to lay out what worked and what didn’t work for the campaigners who came before. They either came, advertised and conquered or they came, advertised and lost. Let whichever camp your political campaign falls into be influenced by the wins and losses of those who have been there, done that and got the hypothetical t-shirt.
Here are the ad platforms and technologies that performed most successfully during the 2024 election cycle:
YouTube
YouTube has more than 95% of the world’s internet population using it, which makes it a no-brainer for executing multifaceted mixed media political marketing campaigns. With more than 238 million users and over 916 billion views per month, the U.S. has the next biggest user base for the video-sharing platform, which explains why both presidential components incorporated it in their strategies.
Alphabet’s Q4 2024 data revealed that YouTube saw a 14% increase in global ad revenue driven by U.S. election spending, breaking the $10 billion barrier for the very first time. Not only does YouTube offer dominance in reach and performance at scale, but it also allows political campaigners to engage with those outside of traditional political channels like Gen Z voters.
Curated PMPs (private marketplace deals)
Curated PMPs and supply-side platforms (SSPs) drove a great deal of the programmatic success of the 2024 election cycle’s advertising strategies. They enabled both political operations to secure high-quality placements and target high-quality audiences while reaping the rewards of the automation and boosted efficiency that programmatic buying permits.
With stringent fraud prevention measures and brand guideline compliance, curated PMPs were also a huge supportive force in brand protection.
Brand safety tech
Advancements in brand safety technology helped prevent fraudulent activity during the election cycle and ensured that ads ran in appropriate environments, particularly within the dynamic context of CTV and programmatic ads. Monitoring brand safety is crucial for all political campaigners as it ensures marketing content aligns with the right audiences and reduces the risk of misinformation being spread.
In the year leading up to the 2020 U.S. election, the vast majority of Americans said they were either “very” (48%) or “somewhat” (34%) concerned about the impact made-up news could have on the upcoming election. Brand safety tech helps political campaigners fend against problematic content and miscommunication.
Vertical video
Almost everybody (99%) now accesses social media on their mobile devices and with a 9x higher completion rate compared to horizontal formats, it makes sense that vertical video ads were popular in both political campaign strategies. This includes formats such as YouTube Shorts, Instagram Stories, and Facebook Reels.
The trend for vertical video ads continues into 2025, making it something we recommend this year’s political campaigners to write into their digital strategies. A majority of 79% of consumers find the vertical video ad format more engaging than others, which strongly signals how target audiences want to receive and view video content across their chosen platforms.
Podcasts
Podcasting was one of the most impactful OTT mediums used during the 2024 presidential election cycle and a channel that warrants becoming a staple in future political campaigns. It enables advertisers to reach and engage with audiences who consume audio-based content, connect on a more personal level and deliver messages in a more direct, human-to-human manner.
By 2026, spending on podcast ads will surpass the $3 billion mark and will account for 35% of spend on total digital audio services — and with 546 million podcast listeners worldwide, it’s a digital demographic that holds a great deal of potential for political advertisers. After all, research shows audio advertising can capture 50% more audience attention per impression than other media, such as video, social media, and TV ads.
Political Advertising Losers from the 2024 Election Cycle
As well as considering the winning campaign and what made it a success, it’s also useful to analyze the losing campaign and the probable reasons for its defeat. Below are two key components of the Democratic digital media strategy that resulted in low performance and wasted ad dollars.
A Fortnite flop
As part of the Democratic campaign, Harris’s political operation launched a custom map in the popular video game Fortnite. The map was given the name ‘Freedom Town, USA‘ and was part of a wider plight to appeal to young, male voters. However, the engagement rates and performance were extremely low.
Despite gaming influencers being commissioned to promote the custom campaign map, it only reached a 24-hour peak of 563 users, which is negligible when compared to the 24-hour peak of 267,000 players on Fortnite‘s main Battle Royale map.
Sleeping on streaming
The Wall Street Journal reported that almost half of 2024’s pursuable voters exclusively used streaming services and podcasts to access content and didn’t have cable TV. While Trump’s team used this demographic context to inform strategic streaming ads targeting a smaller group of 6.3 million persuadable voters, Harris’s team 44.7 million persuadable voters through geographic targeting and other more traditional advertising methods.
In this case, the Democratic approach led to less efficient political ad spending than the Republican team which departed more drastically from traditional media to embrace alternative platforms and strategies.
Best Practices for Political Advertising in 2024: What Makes a Political Ad Effective?
Here we share some actionable guidelines for evaluating your political ads based on their effectiveness in achieving your campaign goals.
Universal Guidelines for Effectiveness
- Name recognition – A political ad needs to generate visibility for the candidate. It needs to keep existing supporters aligned, as well as reach and resonate with persuadable and undecided voters.
- Positioning on issues – A political ad needs to clearly differentiate the candidate’s stance on key issues, and how that contrasts with their opponent. This will help impressionable voters make decisions based on who they feel most aligned with. Ad content, platform placements, ad formats and targeting tactics are all effective ways to influence voter engagement and loyalty.
- Highlighting candidate strength – A political ad should effectively emphasize the candidate’s strengths or unique qualifications, i.e. their USPs as a political leader. Address target voters’ pain points and frame your solution.
- Exposing opponent weaknesses – This was a major tactic in the campaign strategies of both Harris’s team and Trump’s team, particularly for video ad content. Ask yourself: Does your ad leverage the opponent’s vulnerabilities to sway voter opinion? The answer should be: yes.
Best practices
Comparing the opposing 2024 election cycle strategies has taught us that bigger budgets and more lavish ad spending don’t always necessarily equal winning performance. The Democrats may have invested more than double the number of ad dollars than their opposition but it seems that microtargeting, segmentation and behavioral analysis are what helped the Republicans win the presidential race.
Key Learnings on How to Boost Political Ad Performance
Below is some further advice you can follow to set your political ad up for success, including staying open to change, using targeting (and negative targeting) and using data as your guiding compass.
Adapt and innovate
Stay ahead of the evolving media landscape to ensure you’re serving the right content to the right people in the right places. Be open to exploring new tools and strategies, not just the traditional ones.
Know your audiences
Use targeting, segmentation and personalized messaging to speak to specific audiences. The level of targeting precision that programmatic advertising enables will be a game-changer here.
Consider using negative targeting too. An often-underutilized tactic, negative targeting involves excluding specific demographics or audiences — based on factors such as political affiliation — from seeing your ads.
For political campaigns, this can be crucial in avoiding ad fatigue. Additionally, it ensures that you direct resources toward receptive audiences, preventing ads from reaching unintended targets.
Let the data guide you
Programmatic political advertising provides detailed reporting that offers valuable insights into the effectiveness of campaigns. These insights go beyond vanity metrics, delving into engagement, conversion rates, and other crucial data points.
Armed with this data, you can make data-driven decisions, optimize your strategies, and allocate resources where they will have the most impact.
The moral of the 2024 U.S. presidential election campaigning story: spend smarter, not harder. Blowing up your ad spend without insight into what channels to cover, what audience to go for, and how to leverage programmatic won’t deliver the results you want to see.
Run programmatic political campaigns with Grapeseed Media
The lessons we’ve learned from 2024’s political digital media landscape should be used to steer strategies and tactics through 2025 and beyond. Use these key insights to shape your own political plan of attack and ensure you remain adaptive to the evolving media landscape. Tie these in with programmatic advertising 2025 trends and you’ll be one step closer to the win.
When you partner with Grapeseed Media, you instantly unlock access to whole new realms of programmatic potential. Our team of pros is equipped to buy all ad types, on all devices, across 98% of all digital ad inventory, which makes us a programmatic partner you can rely on to deliver results.
Get in touch with our team to learn more about what makes political campaigns effective and how to optimize your political programmatic advertising.
