First Twitter, now Google. Since the last election that shiny new toy has a few scuff marks on it. That’s clearly an opportunity for radio. Between fake news, bots, fraud, hackers and the lack of any regulation, digital has become the wild west of advertising. Radio is far from an unknown. Radio is safe, reliable, affordable and quick to react. Google is the latest digital giant to change its policies regarding political advertising.
2020 is expected to set another record for the amount of money spent on political advertising. At Forecast 2020 this week, Leah Casterlin, founding partner Media Fortitude Partners, said we like radio for political because its the only media where she can call a station, change an ad, and get that ad on the air the same day. If you are attempting to pull in more political ad dollars this year and next you should use that to your advantage.
In a blog post this week, Google says the company is committed to protect campaigns, surface authoritative election news, and protect elections from foreign interference. “But given recent concerns and debates about political advertising, and the importance of shared trust in the democratic process, we want to improve voters’ confidence in the political ads they may see on our ad platforms. So we’re making a few changes to how we handle political ads on our platforms globally. Regardless of the cost or impact to spending on our platforms, we believe these changes will help promote confidence in digital political advertising and trust in electoral processes worldwide.”
Part of that change is limiting election ads that target to the following general categories: age, gender, and general location (postal code level).” Google also says it will give candidates more transparency. “We’re expanding the coverage of our election advertising transparency to include U.S. state-level candidates and officeholders, ballot measures, and ads that mention federal or state political parties, so that all of those ads will now be searchable and viewable as well.
Google expects its changes to go into effect in the United States in January.
Read the entire Google political ads update blog HERE.
