The election ate your media plan.

Every four years, the same thing happens. Political advertising floods the market, CPMs spike, and brand advertisers scramble to figure out where their carefully planned media buys went. In 2024, the scale was unprecedented. Estimates put total political ad spending above ten billion dollars. Not over the course of the campaign. In the final quarter alone. That money didn't come from nowhere. It displaced commercial advertisers from the inventory they'd planned on, at the prices they'd budgeted for, in the markets they needed most.

The smart teams planned for this. They started adjusting media plans in Q2, shifting budgets into channels less affected by political demand, frontloading spend into September, building flexibility into Q4 commitments. They did everything right. And most of them still got squeezed harder than they expected.

The math doesn't care about your plan

Here's the fundamental problem with planning around election-year media disruption: you're competing against an opponent with a functionally unlimited budget and zero concern for efficiency. Political campaigns don't optimize for ROAS. They optimize for reach and frequency in specific geographies during a fixed time window. When a Senate race needs to saturate a DMA for three weeks, the campaign will pay whatever the market demands. Commercial advertisers can't match that because commercial advertisers need their media spend to generate returns.

In battleground states, local broadcast inventory effectively disappeared in October. Not because it was sold out in the traditional sense, but because the clearing prices were so far above what brand advertisers had budgeted that the inventory was functionally unavailable. A regional retailer that planned a holiday push in Phoenix or Atlanta or Milwaukee found themselves bidding against campaigns spending tens of millions in those markets alone. The retailer's budget wasn't wrong. The market just stopped being theirs.

This extended beyond broadcast into digital. Connected TV, which many brand advertisers had shifted budget into specifically because it was supposed to be more flexible, saw CPM increases of thirty to fifty percent in contested markets. Programmatic display wasn't spared either. Political campaigns have gotten sophisticated about digital targeting, and their demand pushed prices up across the ecosystem.

The displacement isn't just about price

The price impact gets the most attention, but there's a subtler form of displacement that matters more. When every other ad is political, commercial messages don't just cost more. They perform worse. The audience is exhausted. They're tuning out. The cognitive load of processing another political attack ad means your cheerful holiday spot or your new product launch gets processed with less attention and more irritation than it would in a normal media environment.

I worked with an outdoor brand that kept its media plan largely intact through October 2024 in several swing states. The media ran. The impressions delivered. But the performance metrics told a different story. Click-through rates dropped. Site traffic from paid media underperformed benchmarks by twenty percent. The brand was technically present, but it was present in an environment so saturated with political messaging that commercial advertising felt like an intrusion rather than an invitation.

This is the part that media plans don't account for well. You can model CPM inflation. You can shift budgets geographically. But you can't model the psychological effect of your audience being bombarded with existential political messaging right before they see your product ad. The context degrades the creative, regardless of how good the creative is.

What the frontloaders got right

The brands that navigated this best shared a common strategy. They pulled significant spend forward into September, treating the month before the political surge as their de facto launch window for Q4. They accepted that October and early November were going to be compromised and planned accordingly. Instead of trying to compete during the flood, they built their brand presence before the water rose.

One consumer electronics company I spoke with moved forty percent of their Q4 brand budget into September. They launched holiday creative earlier than they'd ever launched it. Their CMO told me it felt wrong. The creative team protested that it was too early for holiday messaging. But the performance data bore it out. September delivered their best efficiency of the quarter. October and November, with the remaining sixty percent of budget, delivered their worst.

The frontloading strategy has limits. Not every brand can launch holiday campaigns in September without confusing their audience. Not every product category has the flexibility to shift timing. And frontloading only works if you commit to it early enough. The brands that waited until August to start adjusting their Q4 plans found that September inventory was already getting more expensive as other advertisers had the same idea.

The channels that held up

Not everything was equally affected. Retail media networks, which are growing fast enough to have their own distortions, were largely insulated from political spending. Political campaigns don't buy sponsored product listings on Amazon or Walmart. Brands that had already invested in retail media maintained their reach during the worst of the political surge, though they were reaching consumers in a shopping context rather than a brand-building context.

Owned channels performed relatively better as well. Email, SMS, organic social, and loyalty program communications don't compete in the same auction as political advertising. Brands with strong owned audiences had a way to maintain presence without fighting for paid inventory. This isn't a new insight, but election years make the value of owned channels painfully concrete.

Influencer marketing was a mixed bag. On one hand, the creator economy operates outside of traditional media buying, so influencer rates weren't directly inflated by political spending. On the other, audiences on social platforms were consuming political content at higher rates, which reduced the organic reach and engagement of non-political creator content.

The biennial problem

The uncomfortable truth is that this isn't a one-time disruption. It's a biennial event. Midterms aren't as severe as presidential cycles, but they're significant enough to distort media markets in competitive states. Brands need to stop treating election-year media planning as an exceptional circumstance and start treating it as a permanent feature of the landscape.

That means building media plans with structural flexibility. It means maintaining channel diversity so that no single channel's disruption can derail the entire plan. It means having real relationships with media partners who will protect committed inventory instead of releasing it to the highest bidder. And it means accepting that some weeks, in some markets, the smartest thing you can do with your media budget is not spend it.

The election ate your media plan. It was always going to. The question for 2026 is whether you'll build a plan that expects to be eaten, or whether you'll sit in another Q4 review explaining why the numbers look the way they do.