While Americans sink into their couches this weekend watching football, they may get an unexpected visitor: advertisements for candidates they can’t vote for, running in states hundreds of miles away.
It’s the expected continuation of a phenomenon that began last week when Texas PAC, a group backing Republican Ken Paxton in Texas’ U.S. Senate race, aired a series of ads during FOX’s afternoon football slate, according to AdImpact.
While Dallas Cowboys and Houston Texans fans saw the ad, so, too, did Vikings fans in Minnesota and Jets fans in New York. The reason: It likely cost Texas PAC less money.
“It certainly took a lot of people in the space kind of aback,” said Gerrit Mora, owner of media buying agency Tuesday Digital. “Generally speaking, you really don’t recommend or see that happen very often, or really ever at all.”
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This election season, it may only be the beginning with Election Day less than a month away.
“Frankly, I would be surprised if we wouldn’t see another instance of this happening, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we might even see some sort of copycat activity in other races in different spaces as well,” Mora added.
Michael Franz — co-director of the Wesleyan Media Project, which tracks political advertising — said that in some cases, buying a national advertisement spot can be cheaper than buying a local ad in each of a state’s media markets.
Texas, for instance, has 20 media markets, including two of the country’s biggest: Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston.
Susan Tubbs, owner of the Texas-based media buying and resources company IHN Media Services, said she’s seen that math work out for a client before. They wanted to buy space in 30 different markets, costing $300,000 a week, Tubbs said.
“I’m like, you are wasting your money when we could place $300,000 for the whole month and get the whole country,” she said. “It just didn’t make sense.”
There’s also only so much advertising space on television, Mora said.
PACs, unlike federal candidates’ own campaign committees, don’t get the preferential treatment of a guaranteed “lowest unit cost” and “reasonable access” to ad spots, as required by federal law.
“Those [local spots] get filled up very, very, very quickly,” Mora said. “A PAC is much more at the whim of the overall station dynamics.”
Local news stations are also even more crunched for ad space during events such as NFL games, when there’s more space allocated to national advertisers, Franz said.
That squeeze as Election Day approaches “really does play into” why a PAC would choose to buy a national ad, Mora said.
An advertisement spot during a Cowboys game is also significantly more expensive now than it was at this point of the 2024 election, at least in Dallas.
KDFW-TV, the city’s Fox affiliate, charged a conservative super PAC $200,000 for 30 seconds of airtime as the Cowboys fell to the Baltimore Ravens two years ago, according to records in the Federal Communications Commission’s political ad file database.
This year, Texas PAC paid the station $400,000 for the same amount of late-September airtime, the database shows.
Texas PAC is dropping another $30 million on television ads to support Paxton’s Senate run, Punchbowl News reported Friday.
Mora said the increased rate would affect his decision-making as an ad buyer but that the economics of buying a national political spot are secondary to another consideration: If a national ad draws donors across the country and generates additional buzz in an already-saturated market, it could provide an “edge” for the candidate being supported, he said.
“When you look at those dynamics, and you try to say, ‘OK, where do we spend some money to make a splash?’ I think that ultimately becomes the goal versus strategically placing impressions to drive votes in a certain way,” he said.
“For organizations that just aren’t cost sensitive, doing something like this, it just makes you feel bigger than life sometimes,” Mora added.
Franz also said he “wouldn’t be surprised” by more nationwide ads for statewide races running before Election Day on Nov. 3, although he doesn’t expect to see “a lot of it” between now and then.
Ohio, which similarly has competitive Senate and gubernatorial races, could be a prime candidate for political committees running national ads, Franz said.
Both Franz and Mora also pointed to Michigan, where Democrat Abdul El-Sayed and Republican Mike Rogers are battling for one of the most competitive Senate seats this cycle.
While speaking to colleagues about pro-Paxton ads filling the national airwaves, Mora said people were surprised by the attention the advertisement earned and the interest it generated.
“I just think that we will see much more of this happening,” he said. “The dollar amounts never cease; just keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger. The media landscape continues to be fragmented. You know, the question of where to place and why is always there.”
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