The impact of elections on digital media: why advertising gets more expensive

An election isn't just politics: it's a shock to the ad market. The race pours a lot of money into the auction in a few weeks, and at the same time it locks consumer attention onto the news. For an advertiser, that means two things happening at once: media cost rises and the urge to buy hesitates. This study shows the size of the effect, why it happens, and what you can do to protect your operation.

1. The auction explodes: cost per thousand impressions

Digital media runs on auctions: you compete for each ad slot against other advertisers, in real time. Under normal conditions, the price reflects the competition in your sector. In an election, a different kind of bidder shows up: the political campaign has to turn all its budget into votes by election day. Money left over after the election is useless, so the bid is aggressive and insensitive to price.

The result shows up directly in the CPM (the cost to show an ad a thousand times). In 2022, according to CNN Brasil, the average CPM on Facebook went from R$ 5.03 in the first half of August to R$ 96.71 in the second half, when the political advertising began. And the pressure grows with each cycle:

The R$ 96.71 peak is an atypical, short-window figure. In the day-to-day of the campaign, the market pattern is milder, but still heavy: the CPM that usually sits between R$ 6 and R$ 15 climbs to the R$ 18 to R$ 35 range in the critical moments, more than doubling the price of entry into the auction.

2. In the United States, the same pattern

The phenomenon isn't only Brazilian. In the 2024 US election, online ad spending added up to at least US$ 1.9 billion across the four platforms that publish data (Meta, Google, Snap and X), according to the Brennan Center, which still considers the figure an underestimate.

Most of it went to Meta (more than US$ 1 billion) and Google (US$ 846 million). Demand concentrated on programmatic video and connected TV, where CPMs came to double in the final month, according to market analyses (Basis Technologies).

3. Why, in Brazil, the pressure falls almost entirely on Meta

Here's a detail that changes the game. Since 2024, Google has banned political and electoral ad content in Brazil, across its whole network: search, display and YouTube (Meio & Mensagem). The decision protected search advertisers, but pushed the pent-up political demand almost entirely to whoever kept selling boosts: Meta.

As a result, the dispute that would normally spread across several platforms concentrated on the feed and vertical formats of Facebook and Instagram. Small businesses and e-commerces ended up competing for the same space with thousands of candidacies at once. On top of that, since January 2026 Meta has started charging the applicable taxes on the invoice (a surcharge of about 12%), adding pressure to the cost of media in Brazil.

4. The cost doesn't stop at the CPM: it cascades all the way to the sale

A more expensive CPM is only the start. It pulls the CPC (cost per click) up. And at the same time, conversion falls: with attention split between politics and news, fewer people stop to buy. When you multiply more expensive traffic by lower conversion, the cost of acquisition (CAC) spikes.

That's why, for anyone operating on thin margins, an election isn't a calendar detail: it's a period in which the same budget buys far less result.

5. The other half of the problem: the fight for attention

Even if you pay for the more expensive ad, the attention to make it work is missing. The volume of political appeals saturates the consumer and raises a barrier against any ad.

That last number is the surprising side of the story. A study by the Kelley School of Business (Indiana University), published in Marketing Science, analyzed 849 placements and found a positive effect: a commercial ad that appears right after political advertising retains much more of the audience (an 89% drop in abandonment) and gains a slight increase in positive reactions. The explanation is cognitive: politics puts the viewer on alert, and the commercial message right after works as relief, a mental refuge. The effect held regardless of the tone of the political advertising.

But there's the other side: brand safety. Appearing next to polarized content is risky. Research in Brazil shows that when the consumer assumes a brand supports a political pole, purchase intention falls 14% to 16%. And only about 25% of people think it's appropriate for companies to take public stances on divisive political topics. During an election, the rule is more caution, not less.

6. The backdrop: what the economy explains

Why does conversion hesitate exactly when media is most expensive? Part of the answer is in the economy. An election is, by definition, a moment of uncertainty about the country's direction, and uncertainty makes the consumer postpone purchase decisions, especially the higher-value ones.

Markets translate that into numbers. The economic literature documents political budget cycles: governments expand spending before the election and contract it after. A classic study by Nakaguma and Bender estimated that, in the first year after the vote, the states' capital expenditure (public works and investments) falls by about 28%. And financial markets swing with the race: in 2002, uncertainty drove the country-risk premium to a historic peak; in 2022, the dollar swung sharply between R$ 5.10 and R$ 5.40 around the vote count.

7. What a brand does about it

You can't control the election calendar, but you can reduce your exposure to it. Three market practices help you get through the period without burning budget:

Lean on first-party data. Re-engaging people who already know the brand, visited the site or are in your CRM, WhatsApp and email base costs far less than competing for cold traffic in the inflated auction. The more the operation relies on its own audience, the less it feels the auction.

Measure revenue from the right source. In a noisy period, knowing the real return is what separates a decision from a bet. Revenue should come from an independent, reliable source (the analytics, the CRM, the e-commerce), not from the conversion number the ad platform reports about itself, which tends to overstate.

Track the cost closely. Seeing the CPM and the CAC rise in real time, not at month-end close, is what lets you react: pause what got too expensive, shift budget to search, hold top-of-funnel for after the election.

Frequently asked questions

Methodology and a note on sources

The core numbers come from verifiable, first-rate sources: the 2022 CPM is from CNN Brasil; the US spending is from the Brennan Center; the spillover effect is from a peer-reviewed study in Marketing Science; the Google ban was widely reported.

The off-peak CPM ranges (R$ 18 to R$ 35), the CAC rise (50% to 150%), the ad wear-out window and the attention percentages come from market analyses and institutes, each with its own methodology. They are flagged as such in the text and should not be added together. The dottie example marker indicates an illustrative calculation, not a measured figure.