Dive Brief:
- An ANA blog post outlined how a Trump presidency might affect the advertising industry, and the most immediate concern was possible changes to the tax code that would end the immediate write-off of advertising expenses in favor of amortizing 50% of those expenses over 10 years, a change that would add a $169 to $200 billion increased tax burden over that time period.
- One potential positive is a Trump Supreme Court nominee to fill Antonin Scalia’s empty seat that could become a deciding vote in cases that expand the First Amendment rights of advertisers.
- Other implications cited in the post include the contentious nature of the election might lead to increased privacy concerns overall, and whoever Trump places in leadership positions like the head of the FTC and FCC could have a major impact on advertising.
Dive Insight:
Like every industry, advertising is currently in a state of uncertainty now that Donald Trump is the president-elect of the U.S. At this point, the eventual impact on the ad industry is purely speculation. As the ANA post states, there are more questions than answers for the moment.
However, some important developments are worth paying attention to. Since this is the first time in a long while where one party holds the White House, Senate and House of Representatives, whatever direction decisions that affect advertising end up taking, they are likely to be put into place at least for the next couple of years.
Already, there is wide speculation that AT&T, Time Warner merger is likely to be nixed under Trump's watch as he stated during his campaign that the deal would reduce competition.
While the industry impact is yet to be known, marketers can take a few things away from this election cycle. One important lesson for linear TV is Trump completely broke the tradition of major TV ad spending in favor of an approach built largely on earned media and social media interaction. His campaign did get more heavily into TV toward election day, but total TV spending during a presidential election was way down.
