Kamala Harris has placed $370 million in TV and digital reservations from Labor Day to Election Day, seeking to secure lower rates than last-minute buys.
The $170 million in TV buys include spots in battleground states on shows like Grey’s Anatomy, Abbott Elementary, Survivor and Golden Bachelorette, as well as early evening mainstays like Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy. Also on the list of buys are spots on college and NFL games, WNBA and NBA, NHL and Major League Baseball.
The campaign also said that a $200 million digital buy is the largest such outlay in presidential campaign history, reflecting the changes in consumer habits toward streaming.
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The reservations include connected TV platforms, premium video and digital audio, including Hulu, Roku, YouTube, Paramount+, Spotify and Pandora. “We believe we are well on pace to spend more on digital persuasion media than any political organization ever,” Quentin Fulks and Rob Flaherty, deputy campaign managers, wrote in a memo.
They noted that with the TV buys, the Trump campaign has made long-term reservations only in two states, Pennsylvania and Georgia.
“Rates go up the closer you get to the air date, and there is also less inventory to choose from,” they wrote. “So by buying later, Trump is spending more per ad buy and getting worse ad placements, particularly for high viewership programming like live sports.”
The campaign also said that it is buying spots on Fox News, “particularly during day-time programming which reaches a more moderate audience.” “Our data is clear that the hundreds of thousands of Nikki Haley voters in the battlegrounds and other conservative leaning independents are moving towards us and we’ll be meeting them where they are,” Fulks and Flaherty wrote.
The campaign also said that it was making “a significant eight figure investment” in national TV placements, noting that they “are less likely to be sandwiched back to back with other political ads, a common problem as campaigns get closer to election day.”
The reservations are on top of a current $150 million ad blitz across seven swing states.