Media Life Magazine

President-elect Donald Trump’s nontraditional political ad spending plan worked because he focused on targeted over mass media. He spent way less than his opponent but achieved the results he needed. Going forward, we may see more campaigns run in this matter.

What’s that mean on a practical level? That targeted media such as digital, cable and direct mail will see political spending gains. Television and newspaper, the mass media, will not. That’s what happened in this election, according to final data on the 2016 election released this week by Borrell Associates, the Williamsburg (VA) ad tracking firm. Total political ad spending hit $9.8 billion, up slightly from $9.4 billion four years ago. The numbers include a huge shift in where money was spent. Broadcast TV made up 57.9 percent of spending four years ago but just 44.7 percent this year. Digital spending, meanwhile, increased almost eightfold, from a 1.7 percent share to a 14.4 percent share. “The changes noted reflect more than tactical shifts by an unorthodox candidate. They point to a new ascendancy in both spending and attention for digital in future elections,” notes the report.

When you think of cord cutting, you undoubtedly think of people giving up their subscriptions to pay TV in order to save money. But it may be time to broaden that definition. There’s new evidence that people are cutting the cord on something else as well – broadband Internet.

The finding comes in a new report from Ovum, a media and telecom research firm, which notes that several companies have seen more than one quarter of decline in broadband. It notes that most US telecom providers have been losing landline or cable subscribers for years. But now that’s expanded to include broadband. “Cord-cutting started in landlines and gave way to cord-cutting in pay TV in the US. We are now entering the realm of triple cord-cutting,” says Kristin Paulin, a senior analyst at Ovum. During third quarter, AT&T and Windstream saw declines in all three services they offer (broadband, cable and landlines), while Frontier suffered losses in phone and Internet. Still, Ovum forecasts that broadband decreases will increase over the next few years.

Internet advertising has hit another major milestone. During 2013 spending on online ads surpassed spending on broadcast television for the first time ever, according to data by the Interactive Advertising Bureau.

TV remains ahead of the web when you include other forms of television advertising, such as cable. But based on national network, spot TV and syndication, broadcast dropped behind online in 2013. Digital ad spending hit $42.8 billion in 2013, according to IAB, up 17 percent over 2012′s $36.6 billion.

By comparison, IAB puts broadcast TV spending at $40.1 billion in 2013. TV has long brought in more dollars than any other form of media. Though online spending has been growing at a much faster pace than television for years, TV had such a huge lead that it maintained a bigger share of dollars as well. It will still be a few years before digital spending will surpass the combined total of broadcast and cable TV, which brought in more than $10 billion in 2013, according to the Cabletelevision Advertising Bureau.