All Political Media Buyers Please Note

Reframous.com strongly recommends the Axios Media Trends newsletter by Sarah Fischer. If you sign up for it you can get great insights without our pedantic reframes. One thing that struck me from Today's newsletter was her take on the strength of Netflix. Fischer writes:

"Netflix stock beat Wall Street expectations for user growth and revenue in the first quarter of 2018, adding 7.41 million new subscribers to bring its total worldwide to 125 million."

What's more interesting to us here at Reframous.com is the accompanying chart on the relative size of streaming services:




Let me offer a quick reframe:

Time and time again I've seen political campaigns (usually Democrats) claim that they are checking the digital box because they are buying ads on full screen players like Hulu. Let me be clear: We here are Reframous.com would be thrilled to have 17 million subscribers, but noone thinks advertising on our blog constitutes a digital strategy. A couple points about advertising on Hulu:


  • 17 million US subscribers is fewer than 40,000 voters per congressional district, and that is their total subscriber number not likely voters or a specific target demo.
  • There is approximately a zero percent chance that you will actually reach all of the subscribers in your congressional district, so the effective reach is only some fraction of the whole.
  • On the other hand there are over 214MM US Facebook users and 185MM US YouTube users, so there are outlets for digital video that are more than TEN TIMES the size of Hulu, and in fact are also way bigger than the number of US cable TV subscribers.


 Our conclusion is simple: If you are running a campaign that is large enough to buy TV and you are letting your TV buyer claim to have digital "covered" without placements on the biggest digital platforms you are committing malpractice.

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