Donald Trump's unprecedented lack of ad spending has hurt local media

Local television stations count on elections to provide a quadrennial flood of cash, but this year, Donald Trump's anemic ad spending has left them wanting.

Despite earlier projections that suggested a record-breaking bump this election cycle, it seems the GOP nominee's reluctance to spend sunk those hopes, according to a new report from media forecast firm Magna.

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Instead, the Clinton camp has been filling the gap, bumping local political spending up 3 percent from 2012 -- a measly sum compared to the lofty 15 percent expected.

It's just one of many conventional predictions that Trump's erratic campaign upended this year.

By comparison, total local TV spending grew 10 percent with close to $3 billion in political ads constituting just a small chunk of the $23 billion market.

Trump's mostly ad-free rise led some pundits to prematurely doubt the effectiveness of political ads, a notion the nominee himself encouraged.

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"You almost say, do ads mean anything?" Trump said in May. "I think we're going to hurt the industry pretty much because people are going to say, 'What does an ad mean?'"

But as with many Trump-related outliers, the pronouncement's prediction power seems to be limited to a subject pool of one.

"Skeptics have persistently overlooked the elephant in the room: Trump is a TV celebrity," wrote Mark Lieberman, CEO of media analytics firm Tivo Research, in a recent op-ed. "'The Donald' had the benefit of more than a decade of weekly primetime TV exposure."

The lukewarm returns have also been supplemented by narrow local, gubernatorial and congressional races, which account for about two thirds of political spending.

The one prediction that didn't end up a bust was the migration of ad dollars from TV to digital.

A report from Borrell & Associates last year pegged this election as a record-breaking year for digital mediums, and it seems the numbers haven't disappointed.

Trump has embraced these ads much more openly, even outspending Clinton on digital marketing in June with expenses of $1.6 million on online ads and digital consulting, according to the campaign's Federal Election Committee filing.