Local Media Must Push Back At Facebook For 2016 Election

[Commentary] Media outlets across the country project vast sums of advertising money changing hands during the 2016 election cycle. The Cook Political Report expects $3.3 billion of political advertising to be spent on local broadcast TV for the elections. Borrell Associates anticipates just over $1 billion in digital ad spend with a whopping 50 percent going to social. While it’s fair to consider digital as an ad-on for now, it’s share and impact will continue to increase with each election cycle. Facebook sees this coming, and wants that political spend, and badly. After its 2011 hire of Kate Harbath, the former chief digital strategist for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, Facebook has grown its DC office to over 100 employees. Facebook’s power lies in its ability to target sought-after political audiences, who then willingly post and share these updates with their friends. Paired with its relatively cheap cost and superior ad formats (digitally speaking), and it is pitching itself as a wholesale alternative, not an add-on, to TV spend. Facebook doesn’t have TV, but it possesses the most sophisticated first-party data audience targeting system on the planet today.

Facebook has a solid head start in capturing digital ad spend in politics. But working in local media’s favor, digitally speaking, is the time people spend consuming their content and the ability to cross-promote across digital and TV. But if a digital team can’t parse the demographics, behaviors and political leanings of that audience, don’t expect to earn meaningful digital revenue from politics in 2016. Local media has options, but the first step is recognizing who and what they are competing against.

[Matthew Davis is the VP of product marketing at Reveal Mobile, a Raleigh (NC)-based company that provides mobile audience analytics for local media]