This week, the Vegas Golden Knights won the NHL’s Stanley Cup for the first time, and the Denver Nuggets clenched the NBA finals for their first championship. Viewers had the option to watch the games live on TV or to stream them online.

Streaming deals for major league sports have become increasingly lucrative as media companies try to reclaim audiences lost to cord cutting. But while streaming is creating more options for sports fans, it’s creating some headaches for political campaigns.

“We’ve known for a long time that sports and politics are similar,” said Ben Angle, who handles ad buying for Republican clients at National Media Research, Planning & Placement. “There’s competition, people tend to pick a side, cheer for that side, follow that side, watch that side.”

Angle said that natural connection makes live sports a great place to run political ads. 

“Folks tend to consume it live,” he said. “So people are watching it as it happens. And they’re attentive and engaged, which is what you want out of your audience.”

Campaign ad buyers like him even have data about which sports appeal most to which voters. 

“In terms of partisanship trends, we see college sports traditionally do really well against high-turnout Republican voters,” Angle said. “NFL does well against both parties, [and the] NBA tends to skew toward Democrats.” 

But as many viewers switch to streaming sports rather than watching on cable or broadcast, it can make it harder for campaigns to reach them with their ads.

All those ads now have to go on multiple platforms and often through multiple companies on each platform, said Jesse Contario, regional vice president with MiQ’s political team, which helps place political ads on streaming services, websites and outdoor displays.

“The average U.S. household streams content on seven paid streaming apps today, and 29% of U.S. households actually subscribe to 10 or more streaming apps,” Contario said.

All of those subscriptions can help campaigns gather much more data than in the past to help target those messages, as well as more places to reach voters. 

“So it just expands the surface area of where you can advertise, particularly with live sports,” said Adam Meldrum, president of the GOP-affiliated media buying company AdVictory. “You have all of these legacy cable channels and broadcast channels that cover a lot of sports, but then you also have now all this streaming inventory that’s available too.”

But campaigns are still figuring out how to best use that inventory, and, said Contario, which streams will actually be available. 

“Whether or not political campaigns will be able to run on all of the apps that have locked in some of those live sporting events is yet to be seen,” he said.

Many of the streaming services have ad-free tiers. Media buyers say Amazon Prime and Apple TV+ don’t take political ads, and it’s not yet clear exactly what some other services will allow.

But the bottom line for the 2024 campaigns is that more streaming options will probably translate into more work and bigger ad spends. 

“You are going to have to be moving into streaming, whether or not you want to or not. You have to in order to be able to reach voters,” said Democratic consultant Tim Lim, president of Lim Consulting Services. He said running ads on so many platforms could add another 20% to 25% to campaigns’ TV budgets.

Over the next few election cycles, Lim expects ads on streaming services will start looking a lot like the ads on local and cable news today. And next year’s NHL and NBA finals will likely end up with their fair share of political ads.