Latest in Political Ads

“On any given night, there's 50 million Trump jokes. So I started to stay away from it,” Cedric the Entertainer told Variety in 2020. The same rule does not apply to Trump’s friend Herschel Walker, it seems. In a new 90-second ad for the Progress Action Fund, the star of CBS’ The Neighborhood takes aim at the Georgia…

UPDATED: Nexstar, the largest TV station group, got a boost from midterm political ad spending as well as a rise in distribution and digital revenue in the second quarter. The company reported net income of $226.5 million, a rise of 13.4%, in the period ended June 30. Revenue rose to $1.25 billion, up 10%, from the…

Social media giant Facebook is discussing whether to impose a ban on political ads in its network before the US election this November, according to news reports. Any potential ban has not been finalized and is merely being discussed, according to the reports. Facebook has been under fire for refusing to censor or…

Some Democratic presidential campaigns blasted Facebook’s reiteration of a policy to allow political ads, even those with claims that are false, a contrast to other social media platforms like Twitter that are not accepting candidate spots. “Donald Trump’s campaign can (and will) still lie in political ads,” Bill…

Twitter will stop all political advertising on its platform, getting out of a business that has been fraught with controversy over questions of whether spots need to be fact checked and verified. “A political message earns reach when people decide to follow an account or retweet,” Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey wrote on…

Less than a week before the midterm elections, political TV advertising is setting records for both volume and negativity. Total political ad spending will reach $6.75 billion in 2018, research firm PQ Media predicts, with about half of that going to television. A study released Tuesday by the Wesleyan Media Project…

Broadcast TV investors are finally resigning themselves to the likelihood that stations won’t see the bonanza they’d expected this year from political ads — mostly due to lower than anticipated outlays by Donald Trump. Sinclair Broadcasting shares fell 9.4% yesterday after it lowered its guidance for political…

TV station owners, and their investors, couldn’t wait for the 2016 election campaign to kick off. This would be “the first ever without an incumbent [presidential candidate] or limits on campaign funding,” Moody’s Investors Service said in April. It projected that $3.4 billion could go to stations, helping to lift…

That $4 billion to be spent on TV in the 2016 election cycle is up 18% vs 2012, and could result in a windfall for station owners E.W. Scripps and Gray Television, according to a widely watched business estimate out this morning. Wells Fargo Securities’ Marci Ryvicker tracks political spending more closely than just…

It’s OK to market stuff to captive movie theater audiences. But potentially enlightening or disturbing political and campaign pitches will be off limits this year on more than 20,100 screens at 1,600 theaters served by National CineMedia. The No. 1 exhibition ad sales company says today that it won’t accept political…

Here’s the good news for station owners and networks in an analysis of this year’s political media spending out today from ad forecasting firm Borrell Associates: Cash will continue to flood most markets, with broadcasters seeing $4.6B, an 11.5% increase over 2010, the previous midterm election year. The problem…

Two years ago TV broadcasters kicked up a fuss when the FCC made a simple decision: It ordered them to put online info about the political ads that they air — info they already were required to make available on paper to anyone who visits the station. Broadcasters lost that fight. But it seems that many, possibly…