Since 1997, Susan Collins has served as one of Maine’s senators, and she may be the epitome of Maine. She, like her opponent Troy Jackson, grew up in the state’s northern tip. Her family ran a lumber business for generations in Caribou, and she’s well regarded by Mainers as someone from “the County,” not a politician. During the Barack Obama era, her bloc of crucial swing voters included Arlen Specter from Pennsylvania and fellow Mainer Olympia Snowe, but she’s the last of those Republican moderates standing, giving Maine an outsized national footprint.
So when a political attack ad ran in Portland last week, it would be safe to assume the Portland in question was in Maine. So why did Defending Main Street, a super PAC backing Collins, run an ad in the wrong Portland?
Defending Main Street spent nearly $25,000 on digital placements for “So Many Taxes,” a 30-second ad against Jackson, to run the ad in hundreds of ZIP codes across Oregon and Washington state from Oct. 8 to Oct. 11, according to Google’s Ads Transparency Center. It came to light when an Oregon X user reported seeing five anti-Jackson ads in one day.
“I choose to believe they mixed up Portlands,” the user wrote. The same ad aired on broadcast TV in the intended market, Portland, Maine, reaching about 675,000 impressions over the same four days, according to AdImpact data cited by MS NOW.
Defending Main Street told Newsweek that its media vendor mistakenly placed the digital ads in the Oregon market, and Newsweek reported the targeting was fixed by Monday afternoon. Sarah Chamberlain, president and CEO of the affiliated Republican Main Street Partnership, told NBC News she was furious at the ad buyer, Cross Screen Media, which she said refunded the money. “I would never run an ad in Portland, Oregon, for Susan Collins,” she said.
The mix-up didn’t stop Jackson’s campaign team from commenting on the snafu. “Susan Collins’ allies are so out of touch with Maine, they can’t even find it on a map,” campaign spokesperson Dan Gottlieb told Fortune. “Good luck convincing Mainers you know what’s best for them when you don’t know which Portland they live in.”
Defending Main Street and the Collins campaign did not respond to Fortune’s requests for comment.
A $26.8 billion mix-up
The super PAC got its money back, but the mistake mirrors a problem that costs corporate advertisers billions. The Association of National Advertisers estimates that $26.8 billion in global ad spending is lost each year to middlemen’s fees, fake traffic, unseen ads and low-quality sites, up from $20 billion in 2023. That’s more than double the $11.6 billion AdImpact projects will be spent on political ads in the entire 2026 election cycle.
Much of that waste comes from ads running in places advertisers never chose. In the ANA’s 2023 study, the average campaign ran on 44,000 websites, even though a few hundred sites would have reached most of the intended audience, and even as participants hadn’t approved about 38,000 of those sites. In the group’s latest benchmark, more than a third of automated ad spending still went to ads that failed basic quality standards.
AdImpact has projected $384 million in ad spending on the Maine Senate race, nearly double the roughly $200 million spent when Collins last ran in 2020. And in this race alone, Republicans are outspending Democrats but getting less for each dollar. From July 26 to mid-September, Republicans spent $82.1 million on TV ads in the race to Democrats’ $55.5 million, according to AdImpact data. Super PACs pay full price for TV ads, while candidates’ campaigns get discounted rates.
Location targeting, the tool that sent DMS’s ad to Oregon, can backfire. A 2019 analysis by data firm Location Sciences of 500 million location-targeted ads found that 29% were delivered outside the area the advertiser paid to reach.
In 2017, The New York Times showed JPMorgan Chase one of its ads on a site called Hillary 4 Prison. The bank found its ads had appeared on about 400,000 websites in a single month, but only 3% of them produced any activity beyond someone seeing the ad. Chase cut its list to about 5,000 preapproved sites and saw little change in the cost or visibility of its ads, its chief marketing officer said.
That same year, after activists flagged Uber’s ads on Breitbart, the company began cutting its online ad spending. Kevin Frisch, Uber’s former head of performance marketing, later said the company turned off $100 million of its $150 million annual online ad budget for riders and saw no change in app installs. He blamed ad networks that took credit for sign-ups that would have happened anyway.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com