| |

‘Does Donald Trump approve of my media plan?’ How advertising is getting politicised

‘Does Donald Trump approve of my media plan?’ How advertising is getting politicised
Opinion

Advertising is an increasingly important business discipline that is gaining a political dimension. This could lead to new and different decisions in where adspend goes.


Advertising is now one of the world’s most consequential industries.

It provides the main source of funding for the majority of the world’s largest corporations, many of which have now ingratiated themselves with the world’s most powerful government.

It may well also be critical to the future of AI, the most significant technology development since the internet.

So it is astonishing that the importance of advertising and its future direction have barely featured in any of the vast public coverage of the last few weeks, nor in the ad industry discourse.

Equally disconcerting is that only “brand safety” seems to have troubled our industry at a time when so many other bigger questions should be asked.

Supply-side imbalance

We seem to be missing the implications for how advertising needs to be reassessed in a world that has recently changed.

Advertising is highly influential and growing fast, breaching the annual milestone of $1tn last year and playing a vital role in the fortunes of the “Magnificent 7”.

It has become extremely unbalanced towards the supply side of the industry at the expense of advertisers, with media agencies crossing the divide by becoming resellers of advertising inventory and earning revenues from media vendors.

Within the supply side, there is another imbalance between the big digital platforms and most other channels.

Five companies (Alibaba, Alphabet, Amazon, ByteDance and Meta) now account for 50% of the entire global ad market, according to Warc, and the big ecommerce and social platforms will continue to grow ahead of the market and command a dominant share.

The “Magnificent 7” will also all grow their advertising interests in different ways and have a significant effect on our industry.

Alphabet, Amazon and Meta have all increased their ad revenues dramatically in recent years, while Apple and Microsoft are increasingly active in developing ad products, the latter dominating the B2B ad space with LinkedIn.

Nvidia will provide much of the processing power behind the AI boom (notwithstanding the recent DeepSeek news); it is likely that advertising will play a role in the eventual monetisation of AI.

AI also increases the ability for corporations to harvest public data for advertising purposes, with major privacy concerns.

Even Tesla’s fortunes are linked to advertising via Musk’s ownership of ad-funded X (which, following the “X-odus”, could well be bouncing back — Amazon, for one, is increasing spend there again); Tesla’s value soared on the back of the Donald Trump victory that Musk helped secure via direct funding and relentless politicking on his own channel.

Ripple effects from tech dominance

Almost completely overlooked in recent coverage are the second-order effects of the power of these corporations on our industry.

With the majority of adspend now going to ecommerce and social platforms that make little or no original content, the well-established virtuous circle of advertising-funded media making great content for the public and advertisers has been broken.

The sectors most damaged by recent trends have the highest cost of content generation. Drama, investigative journalism, documentaries and live sport all become subject to intense pressure. This leads to a “dumbing down” of content, where reality TV, game shows and knackered formats predominate.

The big streaming platforms, including Amazon and YouTube, will grow to dominate the connected TV market and push up content costs for others, especially in sports rights.

With so much money going to the social platforms, advertising increasingly pays channels that have the ability to influence elections, change public policy and affect the lives of people in all parts of the world.

Unlike their “old” media predecessors, the big platforms have unaccountable power and are virtually immune from any responsibility for the material they publish.

Their popularity, scale and addictiveness distance them from normal business pressures. Meta will suffer virtually no erosion in its user and advertiser base as a result of its new fact-checking policies.

‘Too big to fail’? Industry reacts to Meta content moderation changes

Although X has seen its revenue halve since Musk’s takeover, it is now largely a political platform that puts pressure on other governments through the prioritisation of its owner’s views.

Advertisers are funding platforms that don’t fully control their content and can be infiltrated by pressure groups, foreign governments, fraudsters and purveyors of many kinds of public and personal harm. This means advertisers are now even more exposed to the extremes of content that they pay for.

Lack of government control

Evidence of the potential effects of social media on society is extensive, including the new Channel 4 study on political opinions among young audiences.

The only true vulnerability the platforms have is governmental control, with multiple jurisdictions conducting investigations. Even this is now likely to change.

The Trump administration has made it clear that the patronage it can dispense may be used as a bargaining chip in negotiations between the US and other nations.

While the newly empowered free-market enthusiasts laud deregulation in the name of “free speech”, greater governmental control of the platforms will be opposed by the US government.

This was explicitly stated by Mark Zuckerberg in his announcement regarding the abandonment of fact-checking on Meta properties.

Governments are obliged to take a “worst case” approach to potential public exposure to harm, but a laissez-faire approach to content could become the global norm if further regulation is prevented.

This could lead to further incidents similar to the Musk-led use of X to inflame public opinion around the Southport case.

Geopolitical games

One of the many problems posed is the manipulation of algorithms to give undue prominence to increasingly extreme views. It isn’t free speech if some people’s voices are artificially amplified for ideological reasons.

We have been warned. The seemingly improbable is becoming normalised by an incoming administration that uses chaos and unpredictability to its own ends.

The US government sees market domination as part of a geopolitical strategy. Google for information, Amazon for commerce, Meta and X for communication, Apple for consumer technology, Nvidia for processing power. The “Americanisation” of business means that the US approach to life becomes the worldwide norm, unless non-US jurisdictions can resist the kind of pressure that is already being exerted.

This is of course related to the future of AI, with the US and China in an arms race to dominate the technology that will determine global hegemony.

Meanwhile, the unimaginably vast investments being ploughed into AI development do not have a set business model, but precedent suggests that advertising will play a key role.

The endgame will probably resemble the internet model, where content is free in exchange for advertising, which feeds off user data — given that this trade-off is now the norm.

When advertising meets politics

So how will this play out for advertisers and what should they be considering in an era when advertising has become inextricably intertwined with politics?

And if advertising has become increasingly politicised due to its influence on the platforms, what happens if advertising itself gets weaponised?

It may seem far-fetched, but advertisers should consider the possibility that the way they spend their ad dollars could be increasingly influenced by the looming global trade wars.

Advertisers should ensure that their advertising investments are solely determined by marketing considerations and not subject to external pressures.

To achieve this, advertisers should arm themselves with the highest possible standard of impartial strategic advice and the best tools to help them achieve the right balance of reward and risk.

New approaches

Fortunately, new techniques and tools are being developed to help them.

Advertisers’ approach to communications planning should focus on what is right for their business but also reflects their responsibility to promote a healthy society and a pluralistic media ecosystem. The latter is vital to reach the widest possible audience with effective messaging.

This isn’t altruism; it’s good for brands and good for business.

With so much choice available, advertisers should invest in advanced techniques that go beyond standard marketing mix modelling (MMM). It is important to integrate additional features including customer experience, digital analytics data and panel-based research.

While the industry is right to welcome new MMM tools from Google and Meta, the impartiality of analysis should be of maximum importance, so these tools should not be used in isolation.

When it comes to media planning, it is one of the great paradoxes that planners have more options in content and channel than ever before but tend to reduce range by relying on digital data metrics that may or may not be real.

You don’t have to be Byron Sharp to think advertising on a one-to-one basis is a funny way to sell something at scale.

You don’t have to be Bob Hoffman to point out the obsession with personalisation that has proven to be massively overblown.

The word “reach” is thrown about to just mean “lots of people”, but it takes an awful lot of ads to do this on a person-by-person basis when everyone sees and hears something different.

Higher standards needed

There is an increasing realisation that advertisers have been painting themselves into a corner with an excessive focus on one-to-one media and social media in particular. The public has noticed.

Social media seems effective because billions of people use it and so do tens of millions of advertisers.

However, advertisers should hold online media to higher standards than any others when considering whether to use them, to what extent and how to get the best from them.

They have to be handled with care because of the potential sensitivity of the content they carry and the advertising environment can be highly variable, with quality media inventory often in short supply; this is especially true for premium video.

In online media, advertisers often buy lemons because peaches aren’t available or because lemons are cheap.

Problems with social media

There are other frequently encountered factors in social media platforms:

  • Their presentation of advertising can sometimes be suboptimal, excessive, haphazard and intrusive
  • They are prone to automated traffic that cannot be properly detected by their users or advertisers, but which is often charged for without independent verification
  • The analytics are self-reported, audience data is in short supply and tracking of placements difficult
  • Attention spans are short and ads are potentially overshadowed by sensational content that has been algorithmically amplified
  • Viewability scores, if available, can be extremely low, even against unrealistically low industry thresholds
  • Their use of people’s data is obscure
  • Some of the audience-reporting practices are highly contentious and subject to legal investigation

 

Each advertiser has to interrogate these factors for themselves, but it is broadly better to be available to the public in a wider range of channels where the quality of ad exposure is optimised.

Advertisers should revisit their approach to communications planning in order not to be forced down an increasingly narrow focus on a limited number of platforms (even if Sir Martin Sorrell thinks this at least makes life simpler).

Help for advertisers

Meanwhile, it is in the advertisers’ best interests that there be media plurality. Achieving the right commercial outcome is not in conflict with the funding of high-quality content in multiple channels. In fact, they are almost certainly correlated.

The good news is that streaming TV is introducing new opportunities to access high-quality environments on Netflix, Disney+ and, yes, Amazon Prime Video, not to mention the longer tail of video streamers. But the sheer power of YouTube will increasingly affect the fortunes of the streaming market.

There have been laudable calls for new media vehicles that restore the balance, but we have to recognise that the toothpaste is way out of the tube in terms of where we are and the answer is to make better use of what we already have.

Great communications planning ought to emerge as an antidote to the perils of constricted supply. There are some brilliant new data and research tools emerging to help advertisers.

The work by Richard Kirk of EssenceMediacom and the new Amplified Intelligence/Omnicom Media Group studies should be required reading.

Profit Ability 2 is another essential resource, as is the “context effects” work from Thinkbox.

Equally exciting is the new work coming out of the Saïd Business School that everyone should be poring over. Warc’s Multiplier Effect report seeks to decipher the codependency between brand and performance.

There is other great thinking out there, but it needs to be used if advertisers are to make the most of their spend and avoid pitfalls. Great planning is worth paying extra for.

Political considerations play their part

Good media governance and solid contractual processes can also help advertisers navigate these increasingly stormy waters.

On the agency side, the winners will be those that can provide high-level business-led advice that makes the most of available options and which doesn’t expose the advertiser to avoidable risk.

Another watchout for advertisers should be vigilance over the increased influence of the platforms as political considerations play a part.

Even the biggest media agency groups are dwarfed by the power of the platforms and there is a risk that investment decisions are vulnerable to political considerations.

The canary in the coal mine is the “lawfare” conducted by Elon Musk over the supposed concert party to limit ad investment into X.

More advertisers have since been added to his lawsuit; in extremis, there is the risk that not choosing to advertise on a channel is seen as a boycott rather than a natural choice. We have already seen this with GB News in the UK.

Independent planning

It is conceivable that communications planning could be influenced by external pressure to the extent that a legitimate question might be: “Does Donald Trump approve (of) your media plan?”

Agencies are somewhat compromised in their relationships with the platforms, being partners, competitors, customers and clients of each other. The Amazon media agency pitch was one of the most hard-fought of last year.

The corrosive nature of media agencies taking money from media owners is hardly news, but it still has the power to shock. The under-reported recent US revelations are a case in point. The rapid growth of principal-based media creates a can of worms where the truth is hard to find.

It’s complicated and advertisers should aim for their communications planning to be as independent as possible from the executional process to optimise growth, avoid trading considerations dominating and prevent “political” factors influencing the allocation of spend.

Independent oversight of planning should be another option, although there are few providers.

The right planning choices

In summary, advertising is an increasingly important business discipline that is acquiring a political dimension. This can and probably will lead to new and different choices and decisions in how advertising money is invested.

Advertisers should arm themselves with the highest possible standard of impartial strategic advice and the best tools to help minimise the inherent risks presented by this new media environment.

They should invest in the right people, techniques and tools to ensure their communications planning is watertight and doesn’t default to media that is easy to buy or deliver extra (usually unseen) margin to the agency.

On the agency side, the winners will be those that can provide high-level business-led advice that makes the most of the available options and which doesn’t expose the advertiser to avoidable risk.

None of this means that brand safety doesn’t matter, but it will matter less if the right planning choices get made at the start.


Nick Manning is the co-founder of Manning Gottlieb Media (now MG OMD) and was chief strategy officer at Ebiquity for over a decade. He now owns a mentoring business, Encyclomedia, offering strategic advice to companies in the media and advertising industry, and is non-executive chair of Media Marketing Compliance. He writes for The Media Leader each month.

Stewart Pearson, Founder, Consilient Group, on 04 Feb 2025
“Congratulations Nick Manning on this tour-de-force. The urgency of action is greater even than you say here. Advertising is more important than even its $1 trillion spend. As the persuasion industry, Advertising is the ultimate source of power and above all political power today. As Michael Mann wrote in The Sources of Social Power, Political power is “the centralized and territorial regulation of social life.” Some businesses know this more than others. Elon Musk bought Twitter not for its advertising revenue but for its power. Some politicians know this more than others. My friend Glenn Peter Young has a marvelous three volume history of U.S. presidential election slogans, Winning Words, ending with MAGA. What we are seeing today is indeed “the centralized and territorial regulation of social life”.”
Ian Dowds, CEO, UKOM, on 04 Feb 2025
“Data is not a zero sum game and agencies are right to use a range of robust data sets to inform their planning. However, if I was a client I would be checking whether UKOM endorsed data from Ipsos iris is a foundation of my agency's data sets. As the UK's agreed industry standard, UKOM's governance ensures the integrity of iris data and so must be part of the answer (for the UK at least). Nick writes that "Advertisers should arm themselves with the highest possible standard of impartial strategic advice and the best tools to help minimise the inherent risks presented by this new media environment. They should invest in the right people, techniques and tools to ensure their communications planning is watertight and doesn’t default to media that is easy to buy." He's absolutely right and, for UK advertisers, UKOM data from Ipsos iris IS something that fuels "the highest possible standard of impartial strategic advice" and IS one of "the best tools."”

Media Jobs