Generally, prices increased or decreased similarly to how we’ve seen in the past based on the following inputs:

• The standard price of the Media market. Corporate America advertising provides the baseline price for a given target audience in the different Media markets, resulting in places like New York City on average being more expensive than places like South Texas.
• How competitively the target electorate is being bid up by other political advertisers. Our most expensively priced campaigns were generally in Presidential swing states, in districts that also had competitive State House races and Congressional races bidding up the price of inventory alongside the Presidential. Many of our cheaper campaigns were where we were the only ones buying for a particular target audience, like a School Mill and Bond campaign with no opposition.
• General elections were a bit more expensive than Primaries or Advocacy campaigns.
• The more dollars per day, per target, a campaign had to spend, the more expensive the inventory, as we would have to bid more aggressively to fully place the buy. This is one of many reasons we encourage our clients to start planning, and, if budget allows, deploying their New Media campaigns as early as possible!

However, none of the above were a hard and fast rule — for example, you can see in the table above that on two different platforms we saw our cheapest inventory come from two separate highly competitive Democratic Congressional Primaries, one in a fairly average priced Media market and one in an above average priced Media market. You would think that the campaigns in these Congressional Primaries would be bidding against each other to drive prices up, and that the Media markets would have provided a higher baseline CPM —  that reasonable assumption is wrong in these two instances. This reinforces for us that even the most wise forecasting cannot possibly be accurate as some of our partners may want, and that we must be able to explain why Programmatic Ad Auctions fluctuate to our partners so  they understand what to expect and are prepared if a given campaign’s prices deviate from what could be reasonably assumed.

A new trend we noticed more strongly this year is that, across the country, target audiences with larger Hispanic populations were much cheaper than the already lowered forecast we set for them when we were crafting proposals. You can see this manifest in the majority of the lowest CPM campaigns listed in the table above coming from campaigns targeting Hispanic audiences.

Wrapping up this section on price deviation — our biggest takeaways for altering our New Media campaign planning going forward are:

• We should further decrease the expected CPM for Hispanic-heavy target audience campaigns than what we were already doing.
• In the past, we have reduced our projected CPM at the same proportional rate for all platforms. We need to make the CPM adjustment larger for Social Media platforms and YouTube, and less for CTV, as CTV fluctuates less than traditional Digital platforms. 
• Due to the variance and unpredictability in price, any advertiser — agency, buyer, or otherwise — offering their clients New Media inventory at a fixed price is doing it wrong. Campaigns and causes should reject any New Media plan built off of a fixed-price model.