Nielsen Finds PSA Results Surprisingly Strong During the 2024 Election Campaign

With the election finally over, we should be able to enjoy watching TV again without the seemingly wall-to-wall political ads. As the dust settled, we took a look at what impact the record-breaking political ad spending affected public service announcements. What we found really surprised us.

Earlier this year, when we surveyed community affairs and public service directors at broadcast stations across the country about their PSA usage plans for the peak months of the campaign, they told us that massive election spending would not hurt PSA airings at their stations. We were happy to hear this, but a bit skeptical about PSAs not being bumped by the expected wave of election advertising.

Now, in looking at the actual airing results we were frankly stunned. PSA airings remained strong through the peak July-October 2024 part of the election campaign. Here are some educated guesses as to how this happened.

Political Advertising Surged During the 2024 Election Season

According to Ad Impact, the political ad tracking research service, the two parties spent more money to buy broadcast advertising for the 2024 election than for any other campaign in American history. Ad Impact estimates that over $11 billion was spent on election related advertising this year. That was 20% more than during the 2020 presidential election. No wonder we were all inundated by political ads every time we turned on our television sets and radios.

The bulk of the spending was for ads that aired from July to October. The chart below from AdImpact shows the pattern of spending during the last two presidential campaigns. Notice how, in both years, political advertising accelerated in July and peaked in the first few days of November. That was when many pundits thought this spending would impact stations’ ability to provide free airtime to run PSAs. However, that was not the case. Stations and networks continued to air PSAs at the same pace they had before the election and some cases even increased their use of PSAs.

How Did PSAs Perform During the Election?

Using Nielsen tracking data, we were able to monitor television and radio station PSA usage throughout the 2024 campaign. We analyzed more than 900,000 TV and 200,000 radio PSA airings that occurred during the four key election months of July-October 2024. These TV airings made up 1 in every 5 television PSA airings Nielsen detected that were not for campaigns distributed by the Ad Council.

What we found was that rather than decreasing in 2024, total July-October 2024 TV airings for the campaigns we monitored received 15% more airings than in the same non-election period last year. For radio, airings decreased by 6%. This was the first indicator we found that showed how well TV PSAs performed during the 2024 election campaign. Next, we drilled down into the data to see what might have influenced these results.

Where Did These TV Airings Come From?

Typically, PSAs air in four places: local broadcast stations, digital stations, cable networks, and regional sports cable networks. The chart below shows the percentage of total airings each one provided in July-October 2024.

Local stations are the broadcast stations we are all most familiar with. They are broadcast stations identified with three or four letter station names that start with a W or K (like WCBS here in New York). Digital stations run on both broadcast and cable TV, often airing reruns of old shows. Cable networks include outlets like Fox News, ESPN, and Nickelodeon and Regional Sports Network represent outlets that run primarily sports programming such as the New York Yankees’ YES Network and professional plus college cable sports events.

What Was the Impact on Donated Media Value?

Local broadcast stations donated 44% of total airings from all sources. Their airings were 21% more than during the same four-month period in 2023, though the media value of these airings was up by only 11%. This probably reflected many of its airings coming from smaller stations or dayparts when fewer people were watching television.

Digital station airings made up 52% of total airings. Though their airings increased by 20% the media value they received decreased by 30%. Here we saw a decrease in the value of an average airing because the average airing generated fewer impressions.

National cable networks performed the worst of the four groups. Airings decreased by 21% and media value by 50%, with networks like Fox News being heavily inundated by political advertising and reducing the number of their highly prized, high media-value airings.

Regional sports networks, on the other hand, saw a large change in the mix of networks that aired PSAs. Airings declined by 44%, with most of the decrease coming from smaller networks, but media value increased by 46%, as the larger outlets increased their use of PSAs.

Since PSA results depend on more than the number of airings received, we looked at the donated media value that came from each group of television outlets. Here we found some big changes compared to 2023’s non-election year results

Below is a quick snapshot of the where July-October 2024’s election year TV PSA airings came from and how their airings and media values changed compared to 2023, which was not an election year.

Overall, total airings from all sources increased by 15% during the key election campaign months of July-October 2024 and the total media value of these airings decreased by 2% compared to the same months last year.  Therefore, no matter which metric you use, PSA results held up well during the peak months of the election campaign.

To put this in even better perspective, let’s take a look how the TV PSAs we monitored performed during the key months of July-October over the last three non-election years of 2021-2023 compared to the election year of 2024.

Airings, which are shown in blue, ran 15% higher in July-October 2024 than in 2023 and close to what they ran in 2022. At the same time, media values ran just 2% less in 2024 than in 2023 and close to what they ran in 2022. From this, we concluded there was no large drop-off in airings or media value in 2024 due to the election. There were some significant changes compared to 2021 that was a reflection of our monitoring more PSA campaigns in 2022-2024.

One last thought. In looking at these results, it is important to remember that no two PSAs are ever the same. Campaign results depend on many factors such as number of airings, audience size of each airing, spot length, time of day the airings occurred, and the cost per thousand impressions (CPM) the SQAD media valuing research service estimates similar ad spots were actually sold for. As a result, there can be a great deal of variability in how individual campaigns perform. That is why some TV PSAs campaigns receive over $30 million in donated media in a year, while others receive only $3 million. Overall, we have found that a typical national TV PSA receives more than $5 million of donated media in the first twelve-months after being distributed.

PSAs Continue to be a Powerful Way to Build Awareness for Nonprofit Causes

It is fair to say that we are all happy to see the election campaign is over. Even better, we were happy to see that PSA results remained surprisingly strong throughout the 2024 campaign period. Thank you to all the television and radio stations and networks that continued to support PSAs and the important causes they promote. And yes, PSAs continue to be alive and well, helping nonprofit organizations to build large national awareness for their important messages.

To learn more about how PSAs can help your organization, please check out our latest PSA 101 article: Are Public Service Announcements Effective in Today’s Changing TV Landscape? and contact the professionals at Connect360 for insights and ideas.

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