Truth Social, the social media platform partially owned by former president and current presidential candidate Donald Trump, is getting into the TV advertising game.
The platform, whose parent company Trump Media & Technology Group went public in March, started running TV ads in late August, and has spent an estimated $1.3 million on linear TV ads since then, according to data from the measurement firm iSpot.
An ad called “Your Voice Matters” has received the majority of the spend, according to iSpot.
The commercial, which is a minute long, begins with shots of people with duct tape over their mouths while the narration tells viewers that “Big Tech is suppressing free speech” and that “there’s a place where your voice matters, a place where freedom of expression is cherished and the love of our country unites us.” The rest of the ad includes shots of the American flag, screenshots of what the app looks like, and shows video and text posts from former President Trump. Trump, always a prolific poster, has posted on Truth Social an average of 24 times per day this year, according to Roll Call.
The ads have predominantly run on Fox News and Newsmax, according to iSpot, and two more ads for the platform rolled out in September.
Not-so-big spenders: Some social media platforms don’t spend all that much on linear TV advertising, per iSpot.
- Twitter, now X, bought ads for a TV campaign in 2015 and a spot during the 2018 Oscars but hasn’t advertised on TV since, per iSpot.
- Reddit ran a five-second Super Bowl ad in 2021.
- Pinterest bought ads on channels including VH1 and MTV in 2022 and 2023, and spent an estimated $1.6 million over that two-year timeframe, per iSpot. It has spent just a fraction of that since, dropping an estimated $123,000 on TV ads this year, according to iSpot.
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There are some exceptions. Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, has spent an estimated $27 million since May on ads advertising the company’s AI assistant, Meta AI, per iSpot. It’s also been buying TV ads for its Meta Quest VR headsets since at least 2018, according to iSpot data. Earlier this year, Snapchat ran a 60-second ad during the Grammys, as well as a Super Bowl ad, as part of a broader brand campaign.
Truth of the matter: Truth Social was founded in February 2022, about a year after former President Trump left the White House and was banned from Twitter for posts he made in the wake of the Capitol riot. It’s since surpassed other alternative right-wing social platforms in traffic. In March, it had roughly 1.5 million unique visitors in the US, according to the New York Times.
The platform has faced some challenges, with Trump Media & Technology Group reporting a loss of nearly $58.2 million in 2023. Its stock price hit a record low of $12.15 in late September before surging in recent weeks. Earlier this month, through a FOIA request, Gizmodo obtained consumer complaints that Truth Social users have submitted to the Federal Trade Commission; Gizmodo wrote that “the documents obtained…reveal that the site has been flooded with scammers who are swindling users out of enormous sums of money.”
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