In Election Battlegrounds, CTV Ad Inventory Is Selling Out: FreeWheels Davis Beet.TV [Video]

Connected TV (CTV) advertising is poised to have a breakout year in the 2024 U.S. political election cycle, with campaigns increasingly turning to the medium for its ability to provide targeted reach at scale.

While the first half of the year saw most CTV ad buys coming through direct deals, programmatic buying is now surging as a key strategy for many candidates in the run-up to November. That’s bringing both opportunities and challenges to the market.

“We’re seeing a tremendous amount of growth in CTV and the first half of the year it was mostly direct insertion orders, but now we’re seeing programmatic really start to take off,” says Eric Davis, Head of Independent & Political, Programmatic Demand, FreeWheel, in this video interview with Beet.TV. “It’s becoming a major strategy for a lot of the candidates.”

One key dynamic in the CTV ad market this election cycle is that, unlike …