Election Day is here. Congratulations, you survived the ads.
Voting is a civic duty. The quiet that follows is a civic reward.
Somewhere in a swing state tonight, a person is on the couch, remote in hand, savoring a commercial break that isn’t about a candidate or an initiative.
After months of attack spots crashing the streaming binge, ominous narrators hijacking the podcast, and a mailbox stuffed with glossy cardstock, the political ad barrage is finally ending.
That collective exhale tells marketers something. When a whole country cheers because the ads stopped, it means the ads overstayed their welcome. Brands that figure out why can run a smarter playbook next quarter.
Political advertising is the ultimate stress test for media planning: huge budgets, one immovable deadline, zero do-overs. AdImpact projected this cycle would hit $10.8 billion, up more than 20% from the 2022 midterms and nearly level with the 2024 presidential year. Whoever wins, that spending hands the rest of us a public case study in what works, what wears out, and what gets painfully expensive. Here are five dos and don’ts worth stealing.
1. Do: Cap your frequency. Don’t: Beat one message to death.
Voters in battleground markets saw the same spot so many times they could recite it. Media planners might call that “saturated awareness.” Voters had other names for it, most of them aren’t publishable.
Repetition builds recall until it builds resentment, and the turn comes faster than most plans expect. A frequency cap is the cheapest insurance in media. Rotate your creative, tailor messages to different audiences, and give your best idea room to breathe.
2. Do: Make CTV a must-run. Don’t: Make it your only run.
Connected TV was the breakout star of the cycle. AdImpact projected it as the only channel to grow past 2024’s presidential-year spending, reaching $2.4 billion and 23% of all political ad dollars. The viewers are moving too: streaming captured 47.5% of all TV viewing in December 2025, according to Nielsen. CTV pairs the big screen with digital-grade targeting and reaches the cord-cutters linear can’t find.
Campaigns noticed, and they piled onto the platforms that accept political ads, like Hulu, Roku, and YouTube. CPMs climbed and premium inventory thinned. Brands that stacked their entire budget in one channel paid more for the same impressions, or got shut out. Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, which don’t take political ads, gave savvy planners a quiet corner of the streaming world. Treat CTV as a pillar, not the whole building.
3. Do: Lean into digital audio. Don’t: Recycle your radio spot.
While everyone brawled over video, audio sat on the sidelines. AdImpact called it one of the most underused channels in the political mix, even as listeners spend a growing share of their media time there. Streaming music, podcasts, and smart speakers catch people in the car, at the gym, and in the kitchen, with headphones on and few competitors in earshot.
Just don’t treat digital audio like radio with a nicer dashboard. You can target by listener, context, and platform, so your creative should adapt too. A 30-second spot built for drive-time FM will flop inside a host-read podcast ad. Match the message to the medium.
4. Do: Pace your spend to the calendar. Don’t: Assume prices will hold still.
Political money doesn’t trickle in. It floods. Roughly half of a cycle’s political dollars land in the final 30 days before Election Day, and about a quarter in the last 10. Campaigns saw the crunch coming and moved their buys earlier, locking in inventory before rising demand shut them out of competitive markets. Football season piled on, and sports-adjacent inventory in battleground states got especially pricey.
Geography mattered too. California led all states at a projected $1.1 billion, with Michigan ($936 million) and Georgia ($757 million) close behind. If your brand lives in those markets, your CPMs felt it.
The lesson reaches well beyond politics. Every industry has its own calendar, from the holiday rush to tax season to the Super Bowl. Build your pacing around those peaks, expect price spikes and tougher competition, and keep enough flexibility to shift budget before a prime slot doubles in cost. The winners aren’t the biggest spenders. They’re the best planners.
5. Do: Run one story across every channel. Don’t: Build a patchwork of disconnected campaigns.
The campaigns didn’t pick a channel. They ran broadcast, CTV, social, audio, and mail at once, and the best ones sounded like a single campaign everywhere. A voter might hear a spot on a podcast, see a version on a streaming app, and get a reminder in their feed. Each touchpoint reinforced the last, and each pushed toward the same action: vote.
That kind of omnichannel visibility mattered more than ever. Broadcast still held just under half of political spending, CTV kept growing, and audio waited in the wings. Advertisers who could see it all from one vantage point could move budget from crowded CTV inventory to quieter audio or display before prices spiked, instead of scrambling after.
Siloed plans can’t pull that off. When every channel gets its own message, audience, and goal, you end up with a patchwork of campaigns that never talk to each other, and rarely add up to results. Start with one idea and one objective, then adapt the creative to each channel’s strengths. Connect your audiences and measurement so you can see how the touchpoints work together.
The goal isn’t to be everywhere. It’s to be everywhere with the same story, so every exposure builds toward an action.
The Bottom Line
The ballots will get counted, the mailers will hit the recycling bin, and the airwaves will get a lot less political. Take a breath and enjoy the quiet. Your audience certainly will.
That relief is the real takeaway from this $10.8 billion cycle. People don’t dislike advertising. They dislike being overwhelmed by it. The brands that earn goodwill treat attention like the gift it is: they pace their message, choose their channels with care, and meet people where they are, in the format that fits.
Political dollars are heading for the exits, which makes the next few weeks a perfect moment to reset your plan. Aim for the kind of campaign people are happy to see, and maybe even a little sorry to see end.
Make sure you’ve cast your vote. Then go rework your media plan.