Stimulate the Economy, Spend on Political Ads
TNS-CMAG’s (Campaign Media Advertising Group) June newsletter on political advertising research shed’s light on 2009 campaign ad spending and off-year political advertising trends.
According to CMAG’S Evan Tracey,
The year following a presidential election is historically the least active in terms of political ad spending. However, current hot-button topics such as healthcare, energy issues, budget woes and job security are keeping commercial breaks full of advocacy advertisements.
To date, over $100 million has been spent on direct federal issue-related ads and even more on ads that address policy — a 10-fold increase from four years ago.
As the new political landscape takes shape, several states have already emerged as make-or-break for both parties. The importance of these must-win states is evident by the fact that a number of seats not up for grabs until 2010 are already seeing political ads, even before Memorial Day 2009. This strategy proved successful in the past as seen with Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who was a big target in 2008 and began airing re-election ads in November of 2007. Just this week, Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) began his re-election campaign with a new ad.
Already in 2009, we’ve seen a great deal spent on advertising for varying political and issue campaigns. CMAG points to a few spending highlights in the first half of the year:
- $15.9 million — total spent this year on TV advertising targeting mayor’s races around the country.
- New Jersey governor’s race has seen approximately $3 million in TV ad spending.
- More than $100 million has been spent on federal issue-related advertisements to date this year.
- A total of approximately $11.7 million has been spent on ads targeting ballot measures.
Here’s a chart illustrating the comparison of political related ad spending in off years.
