Political advertising projected at $11.1 billion in 2024: Forecast

Political advertising spending is forecast to be $11.1 billion in 2024, according to a BIA Advisory Services projection.

BIA forecasts the political ad market to grow by $2.2 billion, up 24% over the last even-year election cycle in 2022. This also marks an increase of $1.5 billion, or 15.5% over 2020, the last presidential election year.

The report also notes that political advertising will be the top-spending vertical in many segments of the market, including OTA TV, digital TV, cable and CTV-OTT.

While local ad spending on digital is growing, traditional advertising is forecast to account for 70.2% of political ad spend in 2024, down from 77.9% in 2020, BIA notes in a post about the forecast.

As with past presidential elections, in 2024, over-the-air TV will get the largest share of political ad dollars locally, with an estimated $4.6 billion in forecast spending. Add in digital TV and the number rises to $4.9 billion. PC-Laptop will be the second highest at $1.3 billion, followed by cable TV at $1.1 billion. Cable TV is the only media channel forecast to be down from 2020 in this category, by nearly $183 million.

Coming in fourth is streaming via CTV and OTT, which is forecast to grow to $1.0 billion in 2024 from only $74 million in 2020. Over-the-air radio remains steady with $536 million in 2024, up 16% from 2020.

The biggest change in the political forecast is the spending on CTV and OTT.

BIA is expecting more spending on CTV-OTT in 2024 by candidates and increased spending by non-political advertisers due to crowd-out.

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CTV-OTT is forecast to move up to fourth place for local political spending in 2024, behind TV OTA, PC-Laptop and cable TV, which could prove to be an opportunity to introduce advertisers to CTV-OTT.