Is the 2025 midterm election on track to be the most expensive in Philippine history?
It will almost certainly be the most expensive midterm election ever, says Jay Bautista, managing director of Kantar Media. Will it cost more than the 2022 presidential elections, the most expensive of all time? Maybe not, “but it will come close.”
In 2022, election commercials aired on television during the official campaign period had a total published rate card value of P181 billion. Bautista estimates that TV accounted for 70% of all political advertising expenditures, or adspend, in 2022. That would put the total election adspend at over P258 billion, or about $4.5 billion. As a point of comparison, that’s less than half of real estate tycoon Manny Villar’s fortune as estimated by Forbes Magazine.
With no candidates for president or vice president, how can the 2025 midterms come close to that total? Bautista IDs three possible factors: significant increases in ad rates, massive pre-election adspend in the 12 months leading up to the deadline for the filing of Certificates of Candidacy last October (which traditionally suggests more heavy spending during the campaign period), and a highly competitive Senate race. Around 10 or so senatorial candidates have a real shot at landing any of the last six Senate seats, and advertising may well be key.
Substantial digital advertising
On the program I host, In the Public Square, Bautista shared election advertising data, including never-before-published aggregate data his company accumulated on adspend. In the five elections that Kantar Media has tracked over the last 12 years, the trend is clear: Election adspend has exploded, even as technological innovations reshaped the media environment from election to election.
An important caveat: All TV adspend estimates are based on published rate cards; it is likely that candidates or political parties do not pay the full rate, and may enjoy discounts as deep as 50% or even more. But because it is not possible to get the precise rate for each ad aired (in 2022, a total of 28,916 campaign commercials aired), the longstanding industry practice has been to publish estimates based on rate card prices.
In 2013, total adspend for TV, which accounted for about 80% of all advertising spending (Kantar Media’s estimate), amounted to P35 billion. This amount paid for 49 hours’ worth of TV ads.
In the 2016 presidential election, total TV adspend doubled, to P67 billion. This paid for 72 hours’ worth of ads. This election also marked the first time that digital advertising, particularly on Facebook, became substantial.
In the 2019 midterms, the value of total TV adspend stayed the same, at P67 billion. But that amount paid for only 45 hours’ worth of campaign commercials — indicating a steep rise in TV ad rates prompted by a realignment among the TV networks in the wake of ABS-CBN’s loss of franchise.
In the 2022 presidential election, total TV adspend, which in Bautista’s estimate accounted for about 70 percent of all campaign advertising then, tripled to P181 billion, making it the costliest of all elections. That amount paid for 199 hours of TV ads, more than double that of the last presidential election, quadruple the total in the most recent election. Digital ads may have accounted for as much as 20 percent of total adspend.
Media research
Bautista has been in the media research field for over 30 years, including almost 20 with AC Nielsen. Kantar Media, like Nielsen, provides third-party verification and monitoring of advertising spending.
In its first three elections, Kantar Media monitored only TV ads. The changes that have swept the media scene have swept through TV advertising too, but TV ads continue to account for the majority, between 60 to 70%, of all campaign advertising.
But in 2022 and again in 2025, Kantar Media added digital ads in the scope of its monitoring, because as the voting public becomes younger, the shift to digital ads becomes more pronounced.
Bautista anticipates that, after election day, the media mix for all campaign advertising would turn out to be 60% TV, 30% digital (including a likely leap in TikTok advertising), and 10% for everything else, including radio, print, and outdoor advertising. This new mix is driven in part by the rise of the under-40 voters who consume digital media.
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The rapid rise in digital advertising is reflected in adspend data that Kantar Media monitored between July and September last year, the three months right before the COC filing deadline (when all advertising is stopped until the first day of the official campaign period). In just those three months, prospective candidates or their proxies spent P12 billion on digital ads. (Bautista makes a note about digital rates: In contrast with TV ad rates, actual prices for digital ads are very close to published rate cards, because of the micro nature of the ad units and because ad tracking is much more precise on digital than on TV.)
No surprise, the lion’s share of the digital ads went up on YouTube and Facebook. But the share of channel hid a few surprises: The largest segment, 30% or some P3.6 billion, was video ads on Android phones; the next two largest were static display ads on social media (23%) and on desktop (16%).
The top advertisers (those who paid for the ads, as recorded by the social media platforms) included Sen. Francis Tolentino (1), senatorial candidate Camille Villar (2), and Makati Mayor Abby Binay (5).
The American historian Daniel Boorstin once described advertising as the rhetoric of democracy. What happens to the democratic project when the rhetoric becomes obscenely prohibitive, available only to the few?
Speech excerpt: Tough guys
Last January, I spoke at the 27th anniversary of the Akbayan party-list group — in the same way I did during its 16th anniversary, as an outsider looking in. I raised two points, first about the multi-dimensional reality of disinformation, and second about the unfortunate reality of the devaluing of competence at the expense of so-called tough talk.
As I have done on similar occasions in the past, allow me to share an excerpt for transparency’s sake. Here is my argument for the second point:
Public service, good governance, compassionate competence — all of this is tough work. But unfortunately the Filipino public by and large doesn’t see it that way.
I am aware that the first group of Filipinos rescued in Thailand from a cyberscam hub in Myanmar by the office of Senator Risa Hontiveros working with other parties actually first reached out to a Tulfo brother — but the actual work of preparing for and executing a rescue in another country with a reasonable chance of success and without causing an international incident involving a close ally is worlds apart from bluster and the bullying of authority figures (whether public officials or corporate officers) on live radio. And yet: The average Filipino voter would I think choose the radio bully’s immediate sense of vindication over the results-oriented official’s close attention to detail.
We do not fault the Filipino public’s need for what I have previously called “everyday justice.” This is one of the bitter fruits of the toxic tree of our history. We are reduced to scrounging around for these fallen fruits and to claim satisfaction in their bitterness, because we have been fed and we feel we have been served. And, in our history, those who make a living out of picking these bitter fruits and handing them out to the hungry and desperate are seen as real, macho, practical, helpful, tough.
While we must seek to get rid of the poison, we must also seek to minister to the poisoned. To do that, we must, aside from other initiatives, also reframe the narrative about competence.
You want the tough guys? You want to vote for the men and women of action? Those who will have your back? You will find them among the many who do quiet but essential work, who complete the staff work needed to actually make policy or move government, who painstakingly put together a solid, thorough impeachment complaint.
’Yan ang astig. ’Yan ang totoo. – Rappler.com
Veteran journalist John Nery is a Rappler columnist, editorial consultant, and program host. In the Public Square with John Nery airs on Rappler platforms every Wednesday at 8 pm.