Do World Events Impact Your Business? (Spoiler Alert: Yes)

By Cap Puckhaber, Reno, Nevad

Updated: 11/4/26

Most small business owners I talk to want nothing to do with politics. I get it, because the news cycle is exhausting and you’ve got payroll to make. But I’ve managed marketing budgets long enough to know that Washington shows up in your numbers whether you watch the news or not. It shows up in what you pay for a Facebook click in October. And it shows up when a platform you built your audience on suddenly has a ban date.

Before I started Black Diamond Marketing Solutions, I spent years in marketing at Amazon. I watched tariff headlines and regulatory fights move ad budgets in real time. Now I run an agency in Reno, and my clients feel the same swings on a much smaller scale. A local contractor doesn’t have a government affairs team to warn him what’s coming. So this post is the playbook I actually use with clients when politics starts moving the market.

Why I stopped treating politics as background noise

Early in my career, I treated policy news the way most people treat weather in another state. It was interesting, but it didn’t feel like my problem. That changed the first time I watched a client’s cost per lead jump about 40% in six weeks with no change to their ads. Nothing was wrong with the campaign. Political advertisers had flooded the same auction, and we were bidding against them for the same eyeballs. Since then, I keep a politics line item in every quarterly planning call.

The connection runs deeper than ad auctions. Tax rules decide how much of a marketing spend you can write off. Labor rules shape how fast you can hire the people who run your campaigns. Interest rates set by the Federal Reserve decide whether a loan for a new website makes sense right now. None of this is partisan. Every party in power moves some of these levers, and your plan has to absorb the change either way.

What a policy shock looks like inside a budget

I’ve watched the same pattern play out with retail clients more than once. They book a big spring push, and then a tariff headline raises their product costs. Margins shrink, so the owner panics and cuts marketing first. Two months later, sales drop because the pipeline went dry. The policy change hurt them, but the panic cut hurt them more. My job in that moment is to slow the reaction down and look at which channels still pay for themselves.

Usually the answer is that a few channels are still working fine. Search ads aimed at people ready to buy rarely stop paying off overnight. Email to past customers keeps converting because those buyers already trust the brand. The channels that deserve a cut are the slow, top-of-funnel ones that take months to show a return. Trimming those first protects the cash without killing next quarter’s sales.

Election season raises what you pay for ads

This is the political effect I can measure most precisely, and it hits every local advertiser. Campaigns and PACs buy huge amounts of TV, streaming and social inventory in the final weeks before an election. Ad inventory is limited, so prices rise for everyone else in the auction. AdImpact projected record midterm political ad spending of $11.6 billion for this cycle. That’s up from $8.9 billion in the 2022 midterms, and it even tops the $11.2 billion spent during the 2024 presidential cycle.

The breakdown matters more than the headline number. AdImpact expected broadcast TV to take about 48% of that money, with connected TV at $2.7 billion. Digital spending across Facebook, Google, Snapchat and X was projected at $1.6 billion. That slice collides most directly with a small business running Meta or Google ads. If you’re in a state with competitive Senate or governor races, the squeeze gets even tighter.

What I see in our own accounts

Nevada is usually a contested state, so our Reno clients feel this every two years. In the last stretch before an election, I typically see Meta CPMs climb 20% to 35% for local service businesses. Local TV gets nearly impossible to book at a fair rate. Streaming inventory in Northern Nevada tightens too, because campaigns love the targeting on connected TV. After the election, prices usually slide back toward normal within a week or two. Watching that cycle a few times taught me to plan around it instead of fighting it.

How I plan around election season

I move as much brand-building spend as possible into late summer, before the political rush. Then I shift the fall budget toward search, email and organic content, where campaigns compete less directly. Search still gets pricier in some categories, but it holds up far better than social video. For one home services client, that shift cut our October cost per lead by roughly a quarter compared with the prior cycle. The total budget stayed the same. We just spent it in the weeks when it bought more attention.

Creative matters during these weeks too. People see so many attack ads that anything loud or alarming blends right into the noise. I lean on calm, helpful creative that feels like a break from the campaign season. A simple video of an owner answering a common question often beats a polished promo when everyone’s feed is full of shouting. It’s cheaper to make, and it usually earns better engagement.

The week after an election is a buying window

Most owners don’t realize how fast prices fall once the votes are counted. Campaign money vanishes almost overnight, but the inventory doesn’t. Local stations and streaming sellers suddenly have open slots they need to fill before the holidays. That’s when I push clients to book short flights at rates they couldn’t touch a month earlier. Timing matters here, so I line up creative before Election Day and launch the moment the campaign spots stop running. Retail and restaurant clients get the most out of this window, since it lands right before holiday shopping starts.

The TikTok fight was a lesson in platform risk

For about five years, TikTok lived under the threat of a US ban over national security concerns tied to its Chinese parent, ByteDance. Congress passed a divest-or-ban law, and the Supreme Court upheld it in January 2025. The app went dark briefly, and then the deadline got extended several times. In January 2026, the deal finally closed and created TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC. Oracle, Silver Lake and MGX each hold a 15% stake, and ByteDance kept 19.9%.

The app survived, so a lot of business owners shrugged it off. I think that’s the wrong takeaway. For a couple of years, thousands of small brands had no idea if their main sales channel would exist next quarter. One of my clients, a boutique selling handmade jewelry, drove almost 70% of her online orders from TikTok. When the ban date approached, she realized she had no email list worth mentioning and no other way to reach those buyers.

The owned-audience fix I push every client toward

We spent the next 90 days turning her followers into subscribers. Every video ended with a reason to join her list, usually early access to new pieces. Her list grew from about 300 contacts to just over 4,000 in that window. When the app went dark for a day, her email sales covered most of the gap. That experience is why I tell every client the same thing. Rented audiences belong to the platform, while your email list and your website belong to you.

Where I send social traffic now

I still love short-form video, and I still run it for clients. But I treat every platform as a feeder, never the foundation. Strong content gets reformatted for Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts, with captions rewritten for each audience. Each post points back to a page on the client’s own website. Search traffic to that site is an asset nobody in Washington can switch off. If a platform disappears tomorrow, the business takes a hit instead of a knockout.

What the new ownership means for advertisers

The joint venture licenses the TikTok algorithm from ByteDance and retrains it on US user data. Oracle oversees how Americans’ data gets stored, and the venture handles content moderation for US users. It also covers sister apps like CapCut and Lemon8. For advertisers, the platform looks stable for now, but the recommendation engine is changing under the hood. I’m watching organic reach on client accounts closely, because retraining can shift what gets shown. If reach drops, we’ll lean harder on paid placements and our email lists.

Brand safety and the urge to go quiet

Polarized news cycles make a lot of brands nervous about where their ads appear and what they say. That nervousness shows up clearly in the data. Advertiser Perceptions research on advertiser brand safety concerns found that 21% of marketing executives had no plans to tie their marketing to any social issue. That figure was up five points from the year before. Brand safety also tied with weak campaign performance as the top reason marketers pulled spending, at 41% each.

I understand the instinct to stay quiet. Most of my clients are local businesses with customers on every side of every issue. A plumber in Sparks doesn’t need a hot take on federal policy to fix a water heater. Still, going quiet doesn’t mean going dark. You can keep showing up with useful content while skipping debates that have nothing to do with what you sell.

The mistake I made with a holiday post

Years ago, I wrote a patriotic holiday post for a client that tied a sale to a current political headline. I thought it was clever and timely. It wasn’t clever at all. The post drew more angry comments in one afternoon than the account usually got in a month, and two longtime customers said they were done with the business. We pulled it, apologized and lost about a week of momentum cleaning up the mess. Now my rule is simple. If a post needs a political news hook to work, it’s the wrong post.

Regulation whiplash and the Corporate Transparency Act

Some political effects never make the evening news but still land on your desk. The Corporate Transparency Act is a good example. FinCEN originally estimated that about 32 million existing companies would have to report their owners to the Treasury Department. Small businesses scrambled to file, and plenty of them paid lawyers or filing services to handle it. Then court fights paused the rule, and the deadlines kept moving.

In March 2025, FinCEN issued an interim final rule that exempted all US-formed companies from beneficial ownership reporting. Using FinCEN’s own estimates, that dropped the number of reporting companies from roughly 32 million to just under 12,000. Owners who rushed to file early spent real money on a requirement that disappeared. Unless the rules change again, a company formed in the US doesn’t file at all.

What I tell clients about compliance news

I’m a marketer, not a lawyer, so I send clients to their accountant for the legal call. What I can do is help them avoid panic spending. When a new rule drops, I ask two questions before anyone moves money. Does it take effect soon, and is it already facing a court challenge? If the answer to the second question is yes, I wait and watch. Keeping a simple folder with formation documents and ownership details ready costs nothing and covers you either way.

Interest rates decide how fast you can grow

Rate decisions from the Federal Reserve rarely get framed as marketing news, but they hit growth plans hard. When borrowing costs climb, the credit line a client planned to use for a website rebuild suddenly costs more each month. Projects get pushed, and marketing usually gets pushed with them. I’ve had several clients delay a full rebrand by a year because the financing math stopped working. That delay is reasonable, but it carries a cost of its own.

When money gets more expensive, I steer clients toward marketing that pays back fast. Search ads aimed at ready buyers, follow-up email to past customers and review requests all return cash quickly. Bigger brand projects can wait for better financing conditions. The mistake is cutting everything at once and letting the pipeline dry up. A smaller plan with faster payback keeps revenue moving while you wait for rates to ease.

Lobbying money shapes the rules you compete under

Big companies spend heavily to shape the rules because it pays off. Bloomberg Government found that federal lobbying spending reached about $5.3 billion last year. Filings on domestic and foreign trade rose 42%, and taxation filings climbed 20%. Those are the exact issues that set your product costs and your tax bill. A national chain has people in those meetings. Your local bakery doesn’t.

Both parties hear from these groups, and the money flows toward whoever holds power. I don’t think that’s worth getting angry about, because anger doesn’t change your margins. What does help is joining the groups that speak up for businesses your size. Local chambers of commerce and industry associations put your issues in front of legislators. I’ve watched a handful of Reno owners get a city sign rule softened just by showing up to council meetings together.

Why big players win on price

Scale lets a large retailer absorb a tariff that would crush a small shop. Lobbying sometimes widens that gap, because carve-outs tend to favor companies with complex supply chains. You can’t beat that on price, so I don’t let clients try. Instead, we compete on speed and local trust. A national brand can’t remember a regular’s order or show up at the youth soccer fundraiser. Those small things show up in reviews, and reviews feed local search rankings.

Local search is where this advantage gets real. Google’s local results lean on reviews, distance and how complete your business profile is. A chain store’s corporate team can’t reply to every review in a personal voice, but you can. I’ve seen clients climb into the local map pack within a few months just by asking every happy customer for a review and answering each one.

Big infrastructure bets ride on political will

Infrastructure projects show how politics can make or break a regional economy. Brightline West, the planned high-speed rail line between Las Vegas and Southern California, broke ground in April 2024 with a $3 billion federal grant behind it. Businesses near the planned stations started dreaming about 11 million projected riders a year. Since then, the target opening has slipped to late 2029. Casino.org figures put the estimated cost at over $21 billion, up from about $12.4 billion at groundbreaking.

The project is still waiting on a $6 billion federal loan. Several Brightline holding companies tied to the Florida line also filed for Chapter 11 this fall. Brightline West says it’s a separate company and the Florida case won’t affect its plans. Maybe that holds up. But plenty of hopeful businesses in Southern Nevada built marketing plans around a train that isn’t coming soon.

Don’t build a plan around a ribbon cutting

This reminds me of ski seasons up at Mount Rose. Every fall, someone promises a monster snow year, and every fall I learn not to book my whole winter around the forecast. You wax the skis, watch the conditions and go when the snow actually shows up. Marketing around big public projects works the same way. I tell clients to build plans on what exists now and keep a ready-to-launch campaign for when the project is real. That way you catch the upside without betting the year on a politician’s timeline.

How I build a politics-resistant marketing plan

After years of watching elections, bans and rule changes move budgets, I’ve settled on a short list of habits. None of them require you to follow cable news. They just require a plan that bends without breaking. I set these up for every new client in the first 60 days.

Hold back a flexible slice of the budget

I keep 10% to 15% of every ad budget unassigned at the start of each quarter. When costs spike on one channel, that money moves to whatever is performing best. If an opportunity opens up, we can jump on it without waiting for approval. One restaurant client used that reserve to grab cheap local streaming spots right after an election, when rates dropped. Those spots drove a 22% bump in reservations over the next month. Without the reserve, that cash would’ve been locked into social ads that weren’t working.

Own your audience before you need it

Email lists, text subscribers and organic search traffic are the channels politics can’t easily take away. I push clients to treat list growth as a monthly goal with a real number attached. A service business with 5,000 engaged subscribers can run a promotion any time without paying an auction price. That independence matters most in the weeks when ad costs are at their worst. It’s also the cheapest insurance policy in marketing.

Check the calendar every quarter

Each quarter, I spend about an hour looking ahead at what’s coming. Election dates, scheduled rule changes and court decisions that could hit a client’s category all go on a shared calendar. I also note platform policy changes, since Meta and Google adjust their ad rules around elections. That single hour has saved clients thousands of dollars in wasted spend. It turns surprises into events you already planned for.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do elections really raise advertising costs for small businesses?

Yes, especially in contested states during the final weeks before voting. Campaigns buy large amounts of TV, streaming and social inventory, which pushes up prices in the same auctions small businesses use. Costs usually ease within a week or two after Election Day. Planning brand spend for earlier in the year helps you avoid the worst of it.

Should my business take a stance on political issues?

That depends on your customers and your category, but most local businesses gain little from it. A post tied to a political headline can drive away loyal customers fast. I recommend sharing values through actions like community involvement instead of hot takes. If a message needs a political news hook to work, I’d skip it.

How do I protect my business from a social media platform ban?

Build channels you own, starting with an email list and your website. Use every social post to give followers a reason to sign up or visit your site. Repost strong content across several platforms so no single app controls your reach. The TikTok fight showed how quickly a main sales channel can come under threat.

Do small businesses still need to file beneficial ownership reports?

Under FinCEN’s March 2025 interim final rule, companies formed in the US are exempt from beneficial ownership reporting. Foreign companies registered to do business in the US may still have obligations. Rules like this can change, so check with your accountant or attorney before acting. I’m a marketer, and this is general information rather than legal advice.

How much of my marketing budget should I keep flexible?

I usually recommend holding back 10% to 15% of each quarter’s ad budget. That reserve lets you move money when costs spike or a cheap opportunity opens up. Businesses with very seasonal sales sometimes keep a little more. The point is having cash ready to react instead of locking every dollar in at the start of the quarter.

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About the Author

Cap Puckhaber is a marketing strategist, finance writer, and outdoor enthusiast. He writes across CapPuckhaber.com, TheHikingAdventures.com, SimpleFinanceBlog.com, and BlackDiamondMarketingSolutions.com. Follow him for honest, real-world advice backed by 20+ years of experience.

If you want to connect with Cap Puckhaber and see more of his insights on marketing, check out his LinkedIn profile where he shares regular updates and professional tips.

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How Politics Affects Your Marketing Budget