Bottom Line: Obama Targeted Ads and Went Local

Nielson has produced some very interesting post-Election ad spending analysis.  If you interested in reading more about Nielson’s work in this area I highly recommend Nielson Wire/Politics.  

In a recent post titled, How Obama’s Local Buys Added Up, Nielsen examines all the ad buys by the 2008 Presidential candidates.  The conclusion: local spot TV was the principle component of the Barack Obama TV buy strategy.

Spot television is all advertising time that is available from local TV stations.  Local Spot advertising is selectively buying on one or more targeted stations in each market separately.  These are purchased through the individual stations.  This is different from National Spots, which is advertising handled at a larger scale, where an advertising will cover several markets over a large region or across the country. 

Acoording to Nielson, “President-elect Barack Obama placed one-and-a-half times as many spot TV ads than John McCain during the general election season (6/08 to 11/08), and almost twice as many ads dating back to the beginning of January when the primaries were just heating up.”

The local numbers show a much bigger discrepancy than those for national cable and network buys. Sen. McCain kept pace w/ President-elect Obama in those categories, with Obama edging out his rival by just 136 ad buys in the cable and network combined, dating back to January.

Other notable campaign facts from Nielsen’s research

• Obama’s ads were on the airwaves over twice as much as McCain’s in the final month before the election (210,245 vs. 97,023 ad buys).
• McCain took early advantage of Obama’s long primary battle with Hillary Clinton, which ended on June 3rd. McCain bought over three and a half times more spot TV ads than Obama in June (26,594 to 7,251), the only month that McCain beat his opponent in that category.
• McCain made a major push with national buys in September, out placing Obama 10 to 1 in cable and network ad buys.
• The two candidates alone combined for almost 850,000 total ad buys dating back to January.

Complete Ad Spends: Jan-Nov 2008

This entry was posted by Brian Donahue on Saturday, December 13th, 2008 at 9:19 am and is filed under Ad Spending, Campaign Strategy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.