As the Kamala Harris campaign gets set for a big week ahead during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the candidate’s political team is also unveiling how they they’ll spend advertising dollars to get their message to voters ahead of early voting and Election Day in November.
As part of a $370 million buy between Sept. 3 and Nov. 5, about $170 million will go to traditional television advertising to reach mass audiences on broadcast and cable. “Voters in battleground states can expect to see Harris-Walz ads during high-viewership moments, including high-trafficked primetime programming like Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy, Abbott Elementary, Grey’s Anatomy, and Survivor, as well as sporting events like college and NFL football games, WNBA and NBA games, NHL games, and MLB games,” the campaign’s deputy campaign managers Quentin Fulks and Rob Flaherty wrote in a memo Aug. 17.
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“By reserving early, the Harris-Walz campaign is securing inventory during high-viewership moments like major sporting events and other national programs before they sell out, like the season premieres of Grey’s Anatomy and the Golden Bachelorette,” the Harris team noted (Grey’s season 21 premieres Sept. 26, while the Golden Bachelorette bows Sept. 18).
Interestingly, the Harris campaign is planning ad buys on Fox News to reach presumably more conservative voters — but not during primetime hours with hosts like Sean Hannity, Jesse Watters and Laura Ingraham. “The Harris-Walz campaign is also expanding its reach to new networks, including through buying reservations on Fox News, particularly during day-time programming which reaches a more moderate audience,” the release stated.
The Harris campaign said $200 million will go to digital platforms (streaming services, connected TVs, audio platforms, podcasts and more), calling media consumption “more fragmented than ever.” And that $200 million figure does not include social media ad buys — like on Instagram or TikTok videos — or Google search buys or display ads on websites.
“These reservations are centered around early investments in the most sought out publishers and platforms like Hulu, Roku, YouTube, Paramount, Spotify, and Pandora,” the campaign wrote. “In making these early reservations, the campaign has secured the most premium inventory, locked in significantly more efficient pricing, and reserved before Trump and his allied groups had a chance to.”
On recent earnings calls, executives at Paramount, Fox and Nexstar highlighted that they expect to see political spending boost revenue at their TV holdings. “In linear, we expect advertising trends in the second half of ’24 to improve with the return of live sports, new fall programming and contribution from political spend,” Paramount CFO Naveen Chopra said Aug. 9.
Nexstar COO Michael Biard noted a day earlier that while the company, which owns NewsNation, The CW Network and The Hill, sees most of its ad revenue from Senate, House and gubernatorial races, “a competitive presidential race is always incrementally positive, especially when there is an intense battle for control of both the Senate and House.”
As far as how the Harris campaign plans to allocate those media advertising buys, it didn’t break down spending by battleground state. But, as far as relative size of spending compared to investment during Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign, the Harris team stated, “We are investing twice as much in TV in Pennsylvania, more than twice as much in Wisconsin, four times as much in Georgia and nearly six times as much in Nevada.”
The Democratic National Convention, which runs Aug. 19-22, begins Monday with Joe Biden and Dr. Jill Biden as the keynote speakers. The sitting president, per the DNC, will outline the “Harris-Walz vision for the future and the stakes of this election.”
