Despite the growth of digital advertising, television still consumed the lion’s share of campaign spending in the 2020 cycle. According to an analysis from the firm AdImpact, 76% of media spending went toward cable and broadcast TV ads, with digital’s 20% spending share representing a rising, but still small, slice of the pie.
For some, this stat represents a fundamental backwardness in how campaigns are run. In a post-election interview with the New York Times, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez delivered a blistering critique of strategies that rely on traditional communications methods: “If you’re not door-knocking, if you’re not on the internet, if your main points of reliance are TV and mail, then you’re not running a campaign on all cylinders. I just don’t see how anyone could be making ideological claims when they didn’t run a full-fledged campaign. Our party isn’t even online, not in a real way that exhibits competence.”
That interview made an intra-party dispute public. Progressives like AOC think that the Democratic establishment and associated organizations and consultants focus too much on campaign tactics from the previous century. Moderates have bristled, and essentially told lefties to mind their own business. Rep. Conor Lamb, another young rising star in Congress, told the Times in response to AOC’s critiques that “It’s not a question of door-knocking, or Facebook. It matters what policies you stand for, and which ones you don’t.” Michigan Rep. Elissa Slotkin, a similarly moderate member, told Politico that while her digital operations were “robust,” Ocasio-Cortez didn’t know her district. “You don’t win races in the industrial Midwest with digital,” Slotkin said.
This is just one point of disagreement amid a larger argument about the future of the party, but it’s notable that the debate over television isn’t, on the surface, about ideology. You could use digital and in-person outreach to propagate any message; indeed, part of the point Ocasio-Cortez was trying to make is that even campaigns running to the center could benefit by stealing ideas from her digital-heavy playbook. But in practice, progressives are the ones arguing for less TV and centrists like Lamb and Slotkin have been defending the status quo.
So why has television come under attack? Here’s a guide to the basic critiques.
Television doesn’t reach the people it used to
Vince Murphy, the creative director of the digital strategy firm Tall Glass Media, is one of the many critics of television spending. Decades ago, when a few broadcast network channels were the dominant form of mass media, TV ads were the only way to get a message out to large numbers of people. But that landscape has broken apart completely, he told Blue Tent in an interview. “Now, eyeballs are so divergent and experiences are so divergent,” Murphy said.
And while some campaigns insist that TV ads are still effective in their districts, the stereotype of digital-illiterate older voters is at this point simply untrue. Nearly half of Americans over 65 use Facebook, and that demographic is the platform’s fastest-growing user base. While digital advertising might be especially effective at reaching younger voters—which explains why progressives in particular have been focused on that medium—there’s evidence that more people of all ages are getting information from social media platforms rather than the TV networks of old.
Metrics for TV ads are nonexistent
When a campaign or PAC buys TV ad time, there’s no way to measure how many people actually watch the ad or how many of them have some kind of response to it. To digital natives, this seems absurd.
“Democrats pour hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars into television advertising with no real metric of, A, seeing if it works, and B, measuring the success,” said Murphy. “You can’t measure the ROI of television ads.”
The effectiveness of digital ads, on the other hand, can be minutely tracked. You can see how many people were served an ad and what demographic groups they were a part of; you can target specific populations to be served a very particular message; you can see how many people clicked on the link in the ad, how many people finished a survey, provided their email or responded to another specific call to action.
Across many industries, from professional sports to media, the world has been trending in a direction toward more quantification and performance tracking. It’s very hard to come up with numbers proving that any individual ad is “good” or effective, and that makes the whole enterprise suspect to many people.
TV spending may be driven by conflicts of interest
For years, progressives have been pissed off about the way the Democratic establishment, in particular the DCCC, wants candidates to run their campaigns. In part, this is about disagreements over the kinds of messages they run on (obviously, candidates further to the left want to use more left-wing rhetoric). But it’s also about spending priorities. Reporting from the past few cycles has found examples of the DCCC mandating that a majority of a campaign’s money be spent on paid advertising, and that a set amount be set aside for TV in particular. This rankles insurgent candidates who think they know their districts better than the DCCC does and look upon the establishment with suspicion.
Many progressives think that the focus on TV is driven by inertia and self-interest: Television ads are the way campaigns have always worked, and they’re a reliable way for many firms to get paid, so many consultants default to them even if their effectiveness has dimmed over the years.
“There’s a consultant class and a consultant culture and a whole buddy-buddy culture with advertisers and television people,” said Murphy. “To me, they have less of an interest in actually making a change and seeing actual results and measuring results and being held accountable, and more interest in just, ‘Hey, let’s try to win, but let’s make some money out of it, as well.’”
Another problem Murphy identified was that many donors like TV ads—they can look really impressive, even if it’s unclear whether they will actually move votes. Things like phone-banking and door-knocking operations may pay better dividends over time for campaigns, but it can be hard to sell donors on their effectiveness. If there’s pressure from both the donor and consultant class to make high-production-value ads, it’s difficult not to go with the flow.
Pivoting away from TV takes effort
New York Rep. Sean Maloney, the incoming DCCC chair, has vowed to modernize the party’s campaign infrastructure and listen to the progressive criticisms of television advertising. But that’s going to be a difficult task.
For starters, the firms and consultants that default to TV buys will have to adopt new tactics, or else campaigns will have to work with different firms. The DCCC would have to loosen or eliminate the requirements on how much campaigns are required to spend on television.
But donors have to change behavior, too. Often, big money bombs come too late in a cycle for campaigns and outside groups to use the cash to build out effective person-to-person outreach programs, and campaigns get stuck burning money on last-minute ads. If Democrats want to wean themselves off of television, they need to start now, and everyone from donors on down needs to get on the same page.
