November 4
Connected TV (CTV) helped fuel record U.S. political ad spending for the 2026 U.S. midterm election cycle.
Ad spend hit a record $11.87 billion, according to AdImpact, more than the company’s prior projection of $10 billion in September 2025. WPP Media projected an even greater sum of $13 billion, according to Axios.
At any rate, it’s the most expensive political ad spending cycle of all time, breaking 2024’s then-record of $11.2 billion.
CTV accounted for 22% of the ad spend with $2.6 billion, AdImpact projected, more than double what the channel generated during the 2022 midterms.
As CTV makes political inroads, experts say advertisers ignore it at their own risk.
“It’s a mass reach tool and ignoring it doesn’t just mean you’re being less effective,” Greg Butcher, founder and president of Alamo Intelligence, previously told The Current. “It means you’re missing as many as half of the voters you need to reach in a campaign.”
Broadcast TV still drove nearly half of the spend with a projected $5.8 billion, according to AdImpact. And sports events seem to be accounting for more of that spend than ever before.
According to recent iSpot data reported by Bloomberg, 71% of spending on traditional TV ads were during sports events, more than 56% in 2024 and 30% in 2022. NFL and college football games accounted for the majority of that spend.
But data from PubMatic provided to The Current supports CTV’s impact this election cycle. The company analyzed 2 billion political ad impressions transacted across its platform from Aug. 31 to Oct. 12, finding that CTV accounted for 86% of spend across all categories; that reached up to 92% in competitive markets.
The channel grew more than four times between the Q2 2022 and Q2 2026 midterm election cycles, Sue Wu, global associate vice president of marketing research at PubMatic, told The Current.
“CTV is the fastest growing channel for political ad spend on our platform, gaining in share from other channels,” Wu said. “This is a clear signal that CTV is maturing as a channel and an indispensable part of media campaigns looking for premium environments and verified reach.”