By the end of the campaign season, political ad spending in the US in 2024 will reach as much as $12.32 billion, according to a recent Insider Intelligence report.
How well are campaigns and their surrogates engaging the audiences they want to influence? We all know ads only work if the viewer is paying attention, so let's take a deeper look at how viewers have paid attention to political ads across both CTV and Linear TV from June 1, 2024 - August 28, 2024.
Independents are paying about 4% more attention to political ads than the average, registering a 106 on TVision's Attention To Visible Index (ATVI) for political ads and a 102 for all other ads. TVision's ATVI measures how attentive viewers are to a specific ad or piece of content when in the room, compared to the average for all television viewing attention.
While Independent is not an exact proxy for undecided voter, it might be safe to assume that more undecided voters are likely to be registered Independents. That makes Independents keying in on campaign ads good news for both campaigns.
Do Democrats Have an Attention Issue?
Democrats are outspending Republicans nationwide on advertising since August 1, according to Axios. However, viewers who are Democrats have paid less attention to political ads than Republicans or Independents so far this election season.
Our second-by-second viewer attention data shows that Democrats pay less attention to all television ads than viewers of other political affiliations. So, while it might not be a surprise that Democrats pay less attention to the political ads than their counterparts, it is noteworthy that Democrats clock in at a 93 on the ATVI for political ads, 7% lower than their average ATVI for all other ad categories
.Independents Also Gave Their Attention to the Conventions
It becomes even more clear that Independents are interested in the campaign season when we look at attention to the major party conventions. Across all the networks that carried the conventions, Independents paid, on average, more attention to the conventions than both Republicans and Democrats.
In the run-up to the November election, Democrats, Republicans and their operatives may be wise to consider optimizing their political ads to address messages that resonate with independent voters, in order to capitalize on the increased attention from this audience.