Meeting the New CTV Political Advertising Landscape: Ampersand’s Al Behmoiras Discusses the Launch of TrueStream Political
Ampersand, an audience-first TV advertising sales and technology company, has announced the launch of TrueStream Political, a purpose-built political streaming solution designed to modernize how campaigns engage verified voters across screens.
Powered by authenticated data from Comcast, Charter, and Cox’s 120M households, TrueStream Political provides political advertisers seamless access to premium, fraud-free streaming content at scale and with transparency.
In this Q&A, Al Behmoiras, VP, Political Streaming, discusses effective methods for modern political media strategies within the CTV ecosystem along with what makes True Stream Political unique in its approach to meeting the new challenges of OTT political advertising.
Al Behmoiras, VP Political Streaming, Ampersand
What are the key challenges for political advertisers with CTV campaigns, and how do these challenges differ from traditional broadcast political advertising campaigns?
Political advertisers are at a turning point with CTV. The pressure is heightened by the extremely short timelines that define political campaigns, which require massive scale paired with high-quality delivery. Compared to traditional broadcast TV, where buying and measurement frameworks are more established and familiar, the streaming landscape can feel fragmented and unpredictable. Advertisers often face unauthenticated signals, inconsistent audience data, inflated reach claims, and sometimes even brand unsafe content.
There is also a growing need for geographic precision. When campaigns need to reach a specific district or ZIP code, IP-based targeting alone is not enough, since it accurately maps to postal households only a small percentage of the time. And unlike traditional marketing where metrics such as awareness or brand lift can matter, political outcomes are absolute. On Election Day there is no second place and no second opportunity.
All of this makes it harder to know whether ads are reaching the right voters and whether every dollar is making an impact. While broadcast campaigns benefit from long standing standards around inventory and reporting, CTV requires campaigns to balance reach with certainty, transparency, and accountability. That challenge is exactly what TrueStream Political was built to address.
How is TrueStream Political taking novel approaches to solve these challenges?
TrueStream Political was built to tackle the specific challenges political advertisers face in CTV. Instead of leaving campaigns to navigate a fragmented landscape, it consolidates authenticated, privacy focused, premium streaming inventory from Comcast, Charter, Cox, and additional high-quality supply partners into a single political offering reaching 120 million households.
A major advantage is the data foundation behind it. Our owners and affiliates provide connectivity to 62 million households, nearly half of all US households, unlocking powerful viewership insights. This scale delivers deterministic, privacy-compliant intelligence that allows campaigns to reach verified households with confidence across screens, without worrying about inflated reach claims or brand safety issues.
By combining deterministic data with premium, fraud free content, TrueStream Political delivers the precision, scale, and speed that modern political campaigns need in a category where timelines are incredibly compressed.
What are some of the most important and effective methods for modern political media strategies within the CTV ecosystem?
Effective modern political media strategies in CTV begin with clearly defining the target audience, grounded in voter and first-party data, before determining the right mix of streaming environments that can reach them. Deterministic insights are the gold standard in political advertising, because campaigns need confidence that they are reaching the most relevant households.
From there, success depends on accessing premium, authenticated CTV supply that delivers consistent, television-grade reach in brand-safe environments. The most effective campaigns combine managed service and programmatic execution. Some political teams want hands on keyboard control, while others want to pick up the phone and rely on a full-service team, and very few companies are equipped to support both models. TrueStream Political is.
Finally, measurement looks very different in political advertising. Traditional marketing metrics such as brand lift or purchase funnel progress are not the priority. Campaigns need transparency and clear voter delivery because the outcome is binary.
In what ways is voter engagement grounded in verified household-level data, especially to determine political affiliations to ensure that ads reach their intended audience?
Voter engagement in CTV is increasingly grounded in verified household-level data, where voter files and first-party datasets are used in a privacy-compliant manner to establish the voting profile of a household. This helps campaigns ensure they are reaching the voters who are central to their strategy.
Instead of relying on inferred or modeled signals, campaigns can align messaging to known voter attributes and affiliations at the household level, which improves both relevance and efficiency. These audiences are then activated across premium, authenticated streaming environments, ensuring ads are delivered to real voters. The result is greater confidence that political messages are reaching their intended audience, with measurable outcomes that support smarter optimization and investment decisions.
Does TrueStream Political also use publicly available voter information cross-referenced with user data to introduce additional political campaign messaging precision?
TrueStream Political leverages one of the strongest data footprints in the media industry across broadband and video. Our owners and affiliates provide connectivity to 62M households--nearly half of all US households--unlocking powerful viewership insights. This foundation enables privacy compliant matching of publicly available voter information with high accuracy and strong match quality, giving political campaigns the level of precision they require without relying on inferred or probabilistic signals.
Working closely with clients, we help establish eligible voter segments so messaging aligns with households where their most critical voters reside. The entire process is designed to deliver verified and validated audiences while protecting individual-level data. By activating these audiences across premium, authenticated streaming environments, campaigns can confidently reach their intended voters at scale in a responsible and transparent way.
What roles does AI play in further refining user data and increasing the effectiveness of CTV political ad campaigns?
AI is becoming fundamental in CTV advertising, and in political advertising it is only as effective as the quality of the data powering it. Models trained on inferred or probabilistic data cannot provide the reliability that political campaigns need.
At Ampersand, AI and advanced analytics are used to interpret signals, optimize delivery, and generate insights, and these systems are grounded in verified, first party, household level insights rather than approximated inputs. Because this data is derived from our connectivity footprint, it reflects accurate and consented information. This foundation allows models to learn from reliable data, which leads to more dependable targeting, stronger measurement, and better decision making in a category where every impression matters.
Al Behmoiras is a seasoned sales leader with deep expertise across political advertising, Connected TV (CTV), and programmatic media. As Vice President of Political Streaming Ad Sales at Ampersand, Al leads efforts to expand the company’s footprint in political and advocacy streaming, partnering with agencies and campaigns nationwide to deliver data-driven, multiscreen TV solutions that influence audiences at scale. Prior to joining Ampersand, Al served as Head of Political Sales for Premion, where he built and led national and local sales teams driving growth across digital and CTV channels. Before that, he spent more than a decade at FreeWheel, where he held multiple leadership roles including North American Head of Sales, Demand Ad Tech, helping bridge the worlds of linear and streaming through convergent technology solutions. Earlier in his career, Al held sales roles at Strata and Reuters, developing a strong foundation in media and ad tech. Based in the Northeast and frequently in Washington, D.C., Al collaborates closely with political partners and internal teams to advance Ampersand’s mission of Moving TV Forward™. He earned his B.A. in Communications from Queens College, lives in rural Connecticut with his family, and—having grown up in Astoria, Queens—remains a loyal Mets, Jets, and Islanders fan.
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