Some experts say targeted ads on streaming services could be crucial in the 2022 US midterms, as others worry the ads evade federal regulation and oversight
Natasha Singer / New York Times : Tweets: @peterhamby and @jason_kint See also Mediagazer Tweets: Peter Hamby / @peterhamby : Feels like I've been reading about this “new” targeting technique for like 4 election cycles now https://www.nytimes.com/... Jason Kint / @jason_kint : Yeah. And the big distinction overlooked here once you get past the risk of microtargeted deceptive political advertising is there is no spreading function to provide velocity and reach like social media plus a lot of it is on a shared screen where counterspeech dampens it. https://twitter.com/... See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
Political ad buyers have been pushed off social platforms step by step: Google capped microtargeting for state and federal candidates back in its 2019 policy shift, researchers lost the tools to track Facebook political ads that same year, and by October 2022 analysts concluded Meta political ads no longer delivered good ROI. The vacuum left behind is where this story sits — connected-TV was already pitched to advertisers after the 2020 election as a way to get online-style targeting on smart TVs without repeating the web ad industry's privacy mistakes.
Now experts flag streaming ads as potentially decisive in the 2022 midterms precisely because they sit outside the federal disclosure and oversight regime built for broadcast and, imperfectly, extended to digital platforms. The counterargument in the coverage, from Jason Kint, is structural rather than regulatory: streaming lacks social media's sharing-driven reach, and ads play on a shared household screen where counterspeech dampens deceptive microtargeting.
First-order effects
- Campaigns chasing voters who left Facebook and can't be microtargeted on Google are moving budget into streaming inventory right now, making CTV a live channel for the 2022 midterms with no federal disclosure regime attached.
- Streaming platforms and their ad-tech suppliers gain pricing power over political spend that used to flow to social networks, while operating free of the ad-library transparency obligations that constrain Meta and Google.
Second-order effects
- Meta's political business, already written down by analysts as poor ROI, loses its strongest remaining argument — unmatched targeting — as campaigns find comparable precision on TV screens with less scrutiny.
- The visibility gap invites pressure on regulators and watchdog groups, who now lack the researcher access that even Facebook's constrained tooling provided, pushing oversight debates toward whatever disclosure rules govern CTV.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, every tightening of platform rules or privacy law simply migrates political targeting to the next lightly regulated medium — an arms race in which regulation perpetually trails the buy-side, and the eventual fix likely has to be medium-agnostic rather than platform-by-platform.
- Kint's reach-and-counterspeech argument suggests the endgame may split oversight into two tracks: strict disclosure for high-velocity viral channels, lighter-touch rules for one-to-many TV formats — a distinction today's federal framework doesn't yet draw.
The trend: Political advertising is serially migrating to whichever medium current disclosure rules don't cover, with connected TV as the latest stop after social platforms tightened targeting.