A study shows that political advertising is moving more into the digital space and moving away from traditional television.

Axios reports that reallocation of political ads primarily from traditional TV budgets means there will likely come a time that political ads — like all TV ads — are bought and sold digitally.

This is a huge departure from the decades-long practice of campaigns buying TV ads that are targeted to local demographic market areas without much precision other than age and gender.

Campaigns will rely on connected TV’s (CTV) to figure out where to spend their money. Unlike traditional TV ads, which are typically purchased ahead of time for a set price, more than 60% of CTV ads are purchased via programmatic real-time bidding on the ad inventory, which complicates transparency measures.

As traditional TV consumption wanes due to cord-cutting, political advertisers are shifting more of their budgets towards CTV ads, in part because they can no longer reach as many voters on traditional television.

TV stations have relied on political ad dollars to help prop up their sagging budgets. In the future it is likely that less money will be placed in the traditional ad buy and more money will be spent in the streaming space.

As one TV newsie said to FTVLive, “Smart campaigns want to target the most people possible. Broadcast TV can’t offer that anymore because its audience is shrinking and shrinking. When the 2024 elections arrive, I believe you’ll see broadcast political ad revenue take a serious, if not lethal, cut.”

TV stations can fight this off by becoming a bigger player in the digital space. But, just look at almost any TV station’s cookie-cutter website and you will see, they clearly are lost when it comes to digital.

There is so much more TV stations could do when it comes to digital, but they continue to stay inside the box and can’t figure out how to get out?

Sitting back, I can see so much more stations can do, but clearly, they seem to be happy with the status quo.

And that could end up killing them