L2 President Paul Westcott asks Alex Ibarguen, Director, Independent & Political Platform Sales at FreeWheel, for her take on what political buyers need to know about reaching voters and driving performance across CTV.
Q: Why is speed such a critical factor in political audience activation?
A: Political campaigns do not have the luxury of long lead times and months long strategy sessions. Priorities can change quickly based on polling, fundraising, early voting activity, new registrations, voter movement, or what is happening in a specific race.
If it takes days to build, onboard, and activate a new audience, the strategy may already have changed by the time the campaign is live. Speed gives buyers the flexibility to react and improve outcomes.
That starts with having current voter data you can actually act on. With L2, campaigns can quickly define or update the audience they care about as the electorate changes, and then move that audience directly into FreeWheel for CTV activation.
Especially later in the cycle, shortening the distance between identifying the voter audiences that matter and reaching them across CTV helps campaigns make better use of every available day and dollar.
Q: What should buyers look for in a platform when activating data like L2?
A: In political, speed, repeatability, and ease of activation matter. Buyers need to get audiences live quickly, make changes as strategy shifts, and repeat what is working across campaigns, markets, and races. But none of that matters if the underlying data and identity resolution are not strong.
It starts with building the right audience. L2 gives political advertisers the ability to define voter universes using registration and vote history, demographics, geography, modeled characteristics, consumer attributes, and campaign specific criteria.
But building a precise audience is only part of the equation. You also need confidence that the audience you selected is the audience you are actually reaching once it moves into media. That is where the strength of the identity graph matters.
A strong identity graph rooted in deterministic data gives buyers greater confidence that the voter audience they selected is the audience they are actually reaching. That is a key advantage of FreeWheel Buyer Cloud. The ability to use insights from Comcast’s first-party deterministic data from authenticated households means that FreeWheel is able to utilize accurate identifiers rather than solely relying on probabilistic signals.
That foundation enables Buyer Cloud to deliver match rates above *90 percent, helping political buyers preserve the precision of the L2 audiences they worked to build as they move into CTV.
Q: When does it make sense to use off the shelf audiences versus a custom audience strategy?
A: Off the shelf audience segments are a great option when speed and simplicity are the priority. Because they are already available in-platform, buyers can quickly select an audience and get a campaign live without building something from scratch. They work especially well for broader awareness, earlier stages of a race, or teams that want a more streamlined path into programmatic activation.
Custom audiences make sense when the buyer wants more control over exactly how the voter audience universe is defined. With L2, that could mean likely voter audiences in a specific district with a certain turnout history, infrequent voter audiences within a particular demographic, persuadable voter audiences in a competitive geography, or voter audiences who have not yet returned a ballot.
Those audiences can be built directly from the voter file and then activated through FreeWheel. As races tighten and budgets become more focused, that added precision can become even more valuable.
A lot of buyers use both. They may start with an off-the-shelf audience to get into market quickly, then introduce custom L2 audiences as the strategy gets more specific or as they want greater control over who they are reaching.
Q: How should campaigns think about reach versus precision in CTV?
A: It is certainly a balance. If you get too broad, you start paying to reach audiences that are not central to the strategy. If you get too narrow, you may not have enough scale to matter.
Political advertising is not just about reaching the largest possible audience. It is about reaching as many of the right voters as possible. L2 gives campaigns the ability to define that voter audience using the voter characteristics that actually matter to the strategy instead of relying on a broader demographic or geographic proxy.
From there, the goal is to preserve that precision while still reaching enough of the audience to matter. Strong identity resolution and access to premium CTV supply become really important at that point. FreeWheel gives buyers the scale to activate those L2 audiences across CTV while staying focused on the voter audience the campaign actually set out to reach.
Q: Where do political buyers lose the most efficiency when moving from voter strategy to media activation?
A: A lot of efficiency gets lost in the handoffs. You can have a clear strategy, but then the audience has to be built, onboarded, matched, activated, and translated into a live campaign. Before you know it, every extra step creates more room for delay, audience loss, or inconsistency between the strategy and what ultimately gets delivered.
The goal is to cut out as many of those handoffs as possible.
The L2 and FreeWheel workflow helps remove some of those steps. Campaigns can build the voter audience directly from L2 voter and consumer data, then move that audience directly into FreeWheel for CTV activation instead of recreating the targeting logic somewhere else. It creates a faster, more direct path from defining the voter audience to actually getting media live against it.
The best workflows keep that path as tight as possible. Buyers should be able to move from audience definition to activation quickly, make changes without restarting the process, and preserve as much of the original voter universe as possible along the way.
Q: How does data freshness affect political CTV performance, especially as registration, turnout, and early vote behavior change throughout the cycle?
A: Political data has a short shelf life, and it gets shorter as Election Day approaches. Registration changes, voters move, voter files are updated, absentee ballots are requested and returned, and early voting creates new signals almost every day.
So much can change in a matter of days or weeks in political advertising. Two weeks can feel like a lifetime. An audience that made sense two weeks ago may not be the audience you should be targeting today. Keeping that voter data current is a core part of what L2 provides. As new registrations, address changes, voting activity, and early vote information become available, campaigns can continually refine who matters.
For political buyers, the value of that freshness is being able to turn those changes into media decisions quickly. A campaign may want to reach a voter audience aggressively one day and suppress that same voter audience after they cast their ballots.
With that current audience moving into FreeWheel for CTV activation, the media strategy can evolve along with the electorate rather than relying on a static audience created weeks earlier.
To learn more about how to activate L2 data with FreeWheel Buyer Cloud ahead of the 2026 midterms, visit here.
