Hey All: Been away from office for 2 weeks and back so you'll hear more3 from us more frequently. Philip Jay LeNoble, Ph.D.

COMMENTARY

Rogue Political Marketers Infiltrate Media Ad Systems - Is TV Next?

• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, 8 hours ago

New political media marketers continue to buy into U.S. platforms. But maybe not from up-and-coming marketers looking to become longtime clients.

Would they investing in Russian bots and troll farms in 2018? Is that the political media buy your company wants to handle?

The Justice Department says the proposed operating budget for Russian-backed advertising spend on mostly social media in 2018 alone was over $10 million.

Should someone kick that envelope full of cash back -- to a charity?

This money was overseen by Elena Alekseevna Khusyaynova, a Russian national who became the first person charged by the U.S. for conspiring to interfere in the 2018 midterm elections, according to the FBI and Justice Department.

And she wasn't just complicit this year.

Khusyaynova is accused of overseeing a $35 million media budget from 2014 to 2018 that covered spending on activists, social media advertising and placing news postings on social networks.

But as far as anyone can tell, not traditional media advertising -- like TV. Still, who is to say, in future years, this would not be an easy way into the U.S. advertising market, especially with the rapid growth of programmatic/automated media buying.

President Trump says don’t worry, never happened — despite the evidence uncovered by Robert Mueller's investigation and 17 national intelligence agencies that insist Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election. Guessing he probably feels the same way about 2018.

Somewhat protecting TV networks from mischievous actors is TV’s limited TV inventory, which is still predominantly a manually handled process. Programmatic/automated efforts are nowhere near being fully incorporated into TV stations’ ad systems, either in local or national TV.