Part Two: The Election Year Playbook
By Chris Brunt and Bob Kernen
In last month’s issue, we made the case that broadcasters need to stop selling platforms and start selling their brand. The audience is the same whether they’re listening over the air, streaming on an app, or scrolling your social feed. The product is the same. The only thing that changes is the delivery mechanism. If you missed Part One, the short version is this: you’re Coca-Cola, and it doesn’t matter whether it comes out of a fountain, a bottle, or a can.
This month, we get specific. With $253 million in political ad spending projected for Wisconsin in the 2026 cycle, the multi-platform brand isn’t just a growth strategy. It’s a survival strategy. Here’s where our conversation picked up.
The Election Year Opportunity
Chris: Let’s talk about the elephant in the room for Wisconsin broadcasters: election year. The governor’s seat is open. The ad money is already flowing. Milwaukee was the second-largest media market in the country for political ad frequency in a recent cycle. For TV stations, that’s a revenue bonanza on one hand and a client-relations crisis on the other. Your local car dealer, your regional health system, your credit union? They’re getting bumped from their regular avails by Super PAC buys. They’re frustrated. They feel invisible.
Bob: And that’s exactly where the multi-platform brand becomes your salvation. If you’ve already built the streaming channel, the app, the social presence, the digital display inventory, you don’t lose that advertiser. You migrate them. You say, “Look, your TV spot is getting crowded out in October, but we can put you on our streaming channel, in our app, across our social, on our website. Same audience, same brand, no political clutter.” That’s a conversation you can only have if you’ve already stopped thinking of yourself as a TV station and started thinking of yourself as a media brand.
Chris: And here’s the thing about CTV specifically. Political CTV spending is projected to hit $2.4 billion nationally in 2026. Platforms that accept political ads, your Hulus and Rokus, will see the sharpest CPM increases. But your owned-and-operated streaming channel? You control that inventory. That’s a competitive advantage over every pure-play digital seller in the market.
Bob: That’s a great point. And it goes back to what we were saying earlier. If you have the trusted local brand, and you have the multi-platform distribution, you’re not competing with Google and Meta anymore. You’re offering something they can’t: local credibility plus flexible delivery across every screen in the market.
Chris: The interesting thing is, small and medium businesses are all using digital portals for marketing now, whether it’s Meta or Google. They’re seeing impression counts. So if you can combine your digital impressions with broadcast impressions, whether that’s your average quarter hour on radio or your ratings on TV, put them together and present the total picture? You’re speaking a language that a 30-year-old business owner actually understands. They didn’t grow up in the Nielsen or Arbitron universe. They grew up in impressions.
Bob: I think that’s a way in to thinking differently. It’s a way into those younger buyers. And especially for a TV station in, say, Wausau or La Crosse, where you might be the only local video source in the market, presenting a unified impression count across linear, streaming, app, and social is incredibly powerful. You’re not a TV station competing against network affiliates in Milwaukee. You’re a local media brand that owns every screen in your DMA.
Bob: The thesis is this: look at these two lines converging. Stop thinking about broadcast and digital separately. Stop thinking about digital as this cute little add-on that’s 10 or 15% of your revenue. Because newsflash, most of your growth is going to come out of that bucket. It isn’t going to come over the air. And in an election year in Wisconsin, the stations that have already made this shift are going to keep their local clients while the ones that haven’t are going to watch them leave.
Chris: If the argument were that digital passing broadcast means you should turn off the tower, then TV should have turned off their tower 40 years ago.
Bob: Exactly. It has to be an “and,” not an “or.” If these traditional broadcast brands, radio and TV alike, can think of themselves as a media brand and go out and sell themselves as a media brand, they win. And if you want Google and Meta to stop eating your lunch, you’re going to have to serve what they’re serving.
The WBA Digital Hotline is a free service of the WBA. To contact Chris Brunt directly with any questions relating to digital revenue, AI, and anything else in the digital space, he can be reached at Chris@jacobsmedia.com. Bob Kernen is the COO of jacapps. Contact him with questions about mobile apps for broadcasters at Bob@jacapps.com.
