As political advertising intensifies for the upcoming midterms, automotive dealers face another competitor for something already in high demand: consumers’ attention.
First things first: Carl Matter, Director of AdTech Performance at Urban Science, told CDG News that election seasons put additional strain on the supply and demand of available media, with major implications for retailers as political ad spending is projected to reach a record $11.6 billion during the 2026 cycle, according to Ad Impact.
It can mean fewer available impressions, increased competition for inventory, and a greater risk that automated advertising systems spend money on less impactful media, explained Matter.
With political advertisers and automotive marketers often trying to reach many of the same people, some impressions may cost more during periods of increased competition, he said.
However, that doesn’t necessarily mean those impressions are no longer valuable, but rather that dealers may need to accept that the same advertising budget could produce different levels of reach, the AdTech Performance director added.
“People who buy cars are people that vote,” Matter said. “They are interested in that media. So… (dealers) …still need to find those people.”
Why it matters: For dealers, that audience overlap means election-year competition cannot simply be avoided. Instead, retailers may need to be more precise about where and how they spend advertising dollars as political campaigns compete for the same consumers and media inventory.
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Digging deeper: The challenges associated with election-cycle media pressure underscore several factors dealers need to remain mindful of when planning and budgeting their media strategies—issues that extend well beyond political seasons, explained Matter.
Election cycles expose a broader weakness in digital marketing: relying too heavily on automated tools without continually evaluating what those tools are delivering, particularly when constrained media inventory forces those systems to work harder to find impressions, he said.
It’s also important to recognize that any significant market disruption can change the environment in which an established advertising strategy operates, ranging from geopolitical conflicts to the automotive chip shortage, Matter added.
The combination of affordability pressure, increased competition for advertising inventory and increasingly powerful consumer search tools that allow shoppers to look quickly across a wider geographic area makes media precision more important, he explained.
“The only constant I would say in our industry is that it’s change,” Matter said. A strategy that is not being monitored “might work for a minute, but it’s not going to work long term”—which makes the election cycle less of an isolated problem than a stress test for how dealers approach marketing overall.
The bottom line: Whether the disruption is an election cycle, economic crisis or another major market shift, dealers need to know which consumers matter, connect media investments to actual sales outcomes, and continually adjust their strategies as conditions change.
The retailers that maintain that discipline can be better positioned to make their advertising dollars work even as competition for consumer attention intensifies.
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