Source: Fortune
Summary
A super PAC supporting Senator Susan Collins mistakenly ran an ad in Oregon instead of Maine, spending $25,000 on digital placements. The ad, which targeted Collins’ opponent Troy Jackson, was placed in the wrong Portland due to a media vendor error. The ad was later corrected, and the money was refunded. Collins’ campaign did not comment, while Jackson’s team criticized the mistake as evidence of the PAC’s lack of local knowledge. The mix-up highlights broader issues in digital ad targeting and spending inefficiencies.
Our Reading
The numbers tell one story.
A super PAC spent $25,000 on ads in the wrong Portland.
The error was fixed, but the damage was done.
The ad was meant for Maine, not Oregon.
The mistake mirrors a bigger problem in ad spending.
Author: Evan Null
A $26.8 billion mix-up
The super PAC got its money back, but the mistake mirrors a problem that costs corporate advertisers billions. The Association of National Advertisers estimates $26.8 billion in global ad spending is lost each year to middlemen’s fees, fake traffic, unseen ads and low-quality sites, up from $20 billion in 2023. That’s more than double the $11.6 billion AdImpact projects will be spent on political ads in the entire 2026 election cycle.
Most ads run on the wrong sites
Much of that waste comes from ads running in places advertisers never chose. In the ANA’s 2023 study, the average campaign ran on 44,000 websites, even though a few hundred sites would have reached most of the intended audience, and even as participants hadn’t approved about 38,000 of those sites. In the group’s latest benchmark, more than a third of automated ad spending still went to ads that failed basic quality standards.
Political ad spending is rising fast
AdImpact has projected $384 million in ad spending on the Maine Senate race, nearly double the roughly $200 million spent when Collins last ran in 2020. And in this race alone, Republicans are outspending Democrats but getting less for each dollar. From July 26 to mid-September, Republicans spent $82.1 million on TV ads in the race to Democrats’ $55.5 million, according to AdImpact data.
Location targeting can backfire
Location targeting, the tool that sent DMS’s ad to Oregon, can backfire. A 2019 analysis by data firm Location Sciences of 500 million location-targeted ads found 29% were delivered outside the area the advertiser paid to reach. The error highlights the risks of relying on automated systems for precise ad placement.
Ads on questionable sites
In 2017, The New York Times showed JPMorgan Chase one of its ads on a site called Hillary 4 Prison. The bank found its ads had appeared on about 400,000 websites in a single month, but only 3% of them produced any activity beyond someone seeing the ad. Chase cut its list to about 5,000 preapproved sites and saw little change in the cost or visibility of its ads, its chief marketing officer said.
