This was supposed to be the presidential campaign that ends the dominance of TV ads — the Snapchat election, the l ive streaming election.

“If 2004 was about Meetup [and] 2008 was about Facebook, 2016 is going to be about Meerkat (or something just like it),” vowed President Barack Obama’s ex-communications guru Dan Pfeiffer.


Not yet. It’s increasingly clear, as two dozen campaigns and their super PACs plot their strategies, that 2016, will be, once again, about television.

Between campaigns and independent groups, television ad spending during the 2016 elections is projected to top $4.4 billion. That’s over a half-billion more than in 2012. And it’s at least four times what campaigns and groups are preparing to spend on their online strategies.

The extinction of the 30-second political television ad has been predicted as long as that of the bald eagle. In 2011, a columnist for The Daily Beast wrote about the advent of the viral Internet video in a piece called “ The End of TV Campaign Ads?”

But that’s not what the roughly two dozen presidential campaigns are thinking, according to a POLITICO survey of ad buyers and campaign strategists.

“The bulk of advertising is still going to be on TV,” said Brent McGoldrick, who served as the director of advertising and analytics on Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign and is now CEO of Deep Root Analytics, a Republican ad-targeting firm. “It is a proven medium. It is a medium that most campaigns and most consultants are used to.”

Even though the Iowa caucuses are more than six months away, candidates and their affiliated super PACs have already spent more than $10 million on TV ads in the early nominating states and nationally, according to The Tracking Firm. There is an additional $40 million in ads already on the books — a figure that includes only two major candidates, Hillary Clinton and Marco Rubio, with big spenders like Jeb Bush, Scott Walker and Donald Trump gearing up their ad plans.

The continued dominance of television advertising doesn’t mean that campaigns aren’t embracing other platforms. But from YouTube to Facebook, campaigns might spend as much in a week as they would on one prime-time spot for broadcast TV.

“It’s very difficult to spend massive amounts of money on digital,” said Elizabeth Wilner, a senior vice president at Kantar and former NBC News political director. “It’s cheap.”

And while more Americans are skipping commercials via digital video recorders or services like Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime, most of those users are younger Americans who are less likely to vote, TV ad-buyers said.

“There’s more television being watched now than ever before — it’s just being watched different ways,” said Evan Tracey, senior vice president at National Media Inc., a GOP TV-ad-buying firm. “For the most part, voters tend to be 35 and older. These are the people who statistically vote the most. So that’s why you still see TV as your biggest megaphone.”

Indeed, most campaigns are looking for new ways to make their TV budgets go further. The strategists, consultants and — increasingly — data scientists who are crafting the campaigns’ advertising plans are utilizing tactics pioneered by Obama’s 2012 campaign, which aired roughly twice as many ads in swing states as Republican opponent Romney in the waning days of the 2012 election.

Part of the Obama advantage was a result of buying airtime earlier in the campaign, before there was so much competition for slots.

“If you lay in your money early, you tend to get better rates,” said Wilner. “The Romney campaign did wait until quite late in some cases. The stations were required to oblige them because of [Federal Communications Commission] equal time [regulations]. But they did pay more.”

Some Republicans appear to have learned from Romney’s mistake and are reserving spots early.

Rubio — the Florida senator who has worked with Optimus Consulting for a number of years — has already booked about $13 million in television buys from November through February in the four early nominating states: Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada. Similarly, the pro-Rubio group Conservative Solutions PAC has made more than $8 million in reservations in the first three states.

But buying early was only part of Obama’s advantage, according to Amy Gershkoff, who served as director of media planning in the early stages of the president’s reelection bid. The Obama campaign combined data from a number of different streams — ad-tracking, polling and TV-viewer data — to create what Gershkoff called “micro-optimization” for targeting the campaign’s spots.

Some Republicans also used 2014’s midterm races as opportunities to explore different approaches. Greg Abbott, who won last year’s gubernatorial race in Texas, allowed Deep Root Analytics to conduct a random field experiment with his advertising before the March 4, 2014, primary.

The experiment reunited figures from then-Gov. Rick Perry’s 2006 reelection campaign, when strategist Dave Carney allowed University of Texas professor Daron Shaw and other academics to alter several aspects of the campaign’s strategy, from polling to the candidate’s schedule.

In the four weeks preceding the 2014 primary, Shaw designed an experiment using 16 of the state’s media markets. He paired markets that were similar by partisan composition, race, age and income. Of the pairs, one market was a control, while Deep Root used what it called “targeted” advertising on broadcast and cable in the second market. The “targeted” buys produced better results for Abbott than the buys in the control markets, Deep Root said.

Deep Root co-founder Alex Lundry is currently serving as director of analytics for Jeb Bush’s presidential campaign.

Targeting isn’t the only innovation coming soon to a TV near you, especially if you live in one of the handful of states with prominent roles in the primaries or the general election. With such a crowded Republican field, some experts predicted the candidates will struggle to make an impression if they stick with formulaic spots.

“If we head into 2016 and there are still close to this many candidates, you’ll start seeing ads that look different and feel different in an effort to break through,” Wilner said.

And despite the continued focus on television, digital ads will be important for campaigns hoping to reach younger voters. But some Republicans worry that the party will again be too slow to adjust, though official party committees are telling their candidates that digital investment is necessary.

“I think on the Republican side, there’s a very good case to say, ‘Yes, but our demographics may tend to skew a bit older,’ so one might expect that a Republican campaign might spend less in terms of digital,” said McGoldrick. “But I think that’s really the wrong question. The right question is, ‘Where are your target voters, and how are they consuming media, and what’s the most cost-effective way to [reach them]?’ Answering that question is, by definition, going to mean more of a shift to digital.”

“You just cannot reach people 25 and younger on television,” added Vincent Harris, who is running Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul’s digital operation. “You just can’t. I think that campaigns — especially Republican presidential campaigns — are running campaigns largely like they were in 2000.”

But even if there is an increased emphasis on digital in 2016, campaigns and their affiliates will be so well-funded that they will still spend record amounts on TV.

“It’s all up to the ability of the candidates to raise the money,” said Tracey. “Spending it won’t be a problem. If they can raise it, they’ll find ways to spend it.”