He was speaking earlier this month at a postelection conference organized by the (WMP), which tracks advertising spending in political campaign and where Franz is a codirector.
The latest spending cycle covered television and radio advertising in federal and gubernatorial campaigns, said Franz. “Our conference at Wesleyan University was the first chance for us to present some of our key findings about political ads in the 2024 cycle. We will be publishing some of these results in the coming year, and we’ll continue to dig into the data, looking at trends and spending from a variety of angles over the course of the next year and a half.”
Addressing delegates at the conference, Franz said most of the $5 billion that was spent went toward broadcast television ads. Looking at the presidential campaign, he pointed out that Democrat Kamala Harris outspent her Republican opponent Donald Trump on ads across all media—TV, radio, and social media. However, Franz went on to stress, the broadcast, network, and national cable spending was unusually close between the two candidates.
Quoted in a Wesleyan University , Franz also discussed the impact of ad spending and asked how much this really matters when it comes to election time. In the battleground states, for example, where the presidential race was closer, there’s not much evidence that ad spending had a significant impact on the outcome, said Franz. “If you look at the ads themselves and you correlate ad buys at the market level with county-level vote returns, which we’ve been doing for a long time, we tend to find very small effects,” he said. “We find no real relationship between all that ad buying—TV broadcast ad buying—and the outcome [of the election].” .
Franz has been involved with the WMP since its launch in 2010. Prior to that he was affiliated with its predecessor, the Wisconsin Advertising Project, which operated from 2000 to 2008. All told, Franz has been working with political advertising data for nearly twenty-five years.
