Harris-Walz campaign to spend $370 mn on digital, TV ads in push to Nov. 5

By Jenny Leonard

The Harris-Walz campaign says it plans to spend at least $370 million on digital and television ads between Labor Day and Nov. 5, the final stretch of a race to reach voters mostly in battleground states. 
 

The campaign this weekend placed $170 million in TV reservations, which comes on top of $200 million in digital reservations, deputy campaign managers Quentin Fulks and Rob Flaherty said in a memo Saturday.

The reservations include time during major sporting events and “high-viewership moments” like the season premieres of Grey’s Anatomy and the Golden Bachelorette and are intended to introduce Harris to voters and not let Trump define her, the campaign said.

For August, Trump and his allied super-PACs have booked about 60 per cent of the ad time, reversing the advertising advantage Democrats have had for most of the campaign. 

Trump-aligned Preserve America PAC launched its first round of advertising during the Olympics last month and plans to spend about $60 million through Labor Day, according to a person familiar with its plans. 

Harris, Trump Duel Over the Airwaves With $247 Million Ad War

Both campaigns have injected millions of dollars worth of television ads since Harris entered the race, a sign that both teams are flush with cash and hoping to leverage that into a polling edge. 

As of Aug. 14, the presidential campaigns and their allies have already bought or reserved $247 million in ad spending to run this month, 19 per cent more than they did in all of August of 2020, according to data from ad-tracking firm AdImpact compiled by Bloomberg.

Largely funded by Las Vegas Sands Corp. majority shareholder Miriam Adelson, the super-PAC expects to spend more than the $100 million it spent in 2020, the person said. It has focused most of its advertising on the border crisis.

The Harris-Walz campaign also placed more than $200 million in digital reservations on platforms like Hulu, Roku, Youtube, Spotify and Pandora. The reservations include day-time programming on Fox News, which reaches “a more moderate audience,” they added.

“Our data is clear that the hundreds of thousands of Nikki Haley voters in the battlegrounds and other conservative leaning independents are moving towards us and we’ll be meeting them where they are.”