Donald Trump's Personal Money Probably Won't Help Political Ad Spending

The final week of Donald Trump's campaign for president has turned into a question of "will he? or won't he?" like some kind of sitcom romance. The week of Oct 24, it was reported that Trump only donated $31,000 of his own money to his campaign in early October. (By comparison, rival Hillary Clinton shelled out $50,000 of her own cash.) To show them who's boss, he wired $10 million to his campaign that very same day to buy more ad time.

But is it too little too late? Local markets have been consistently reporting that Trump isn't spending what they expected him to, even when compared to previous election cycles. Perhaps that's because he's waiting until the last minute to book ad time, or that his campaign has been more focused on damage control, or maybe it's the free media he garners from his rallies, which just got a shot in the arm from the FBI. Whatever the reasons, according to Strata, a Comcast-owned ad-tech software firm that processes $50 billion in ad transactions a year, many political agencies don't believe he'll ramp up the ad spend.