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.

With more evidence to show that gas prices are trickling down throughout the economy, broadcast TV advertising has taken a hit.

With less cars being purchased, car companies have pulled back on some of their advertising. This has generated a net decrease in broadcast TV ad revenue of 4.8%. AdAge’s Brian Steinberg observed last week:

Network TV ad revenue was down 4.8% in the quarter, and local broadcast ad revenue fell 9.1%, while syndicated TV ad revenue was up 9.1%, the TVB said, citing statistics culled from TNS Media Intelligence. For the first half of 2008, network TV ad revenue fell 1.5%, local broadcast ad revenue fell 3.8% and syndicated TV was up 10.2%, the industry organization said. 

The figures come as media buyers have said that third-quarter scatter advertising, or ad time purchased closer to the time it airs, has been sluggish, and also as advertisers have dithered over whether or not to trim some of the dollars they committed to network TV in the upfront. Media buyers say clients and networks have seemed nervous about whether all the money put down by advertisers during upfront negotiations will remain available as marketers try to navigate their way through a tougher-than-expected economic time. 

As the political market heats up, media buyers have seen a sharp increase in third-quarter scatter advertising, airtime that is purchased close to the air date. This type of buying is very typical in the political media purchasing world.

Political media consultants are gearing up to make very large purchases on behalf of candidate committees, IEs, IAs, PACs, Coordinated Expenditures and any other type of committee I may have forgotten.  These buys will sharply change the amount purchased and the inventory available across all platforms – broadcast networks, spot cable, national cable, Direct TV, Dish Network, radio broadcast, and XM/Sirius radio.

As reported last week, the RNC and McCain have almost $96 million on hand. Much of that money needs to be spent before McCain takes public financing after he accepts the nomination at the beginning of next month. Obama and the DNC have yet to publicly report their figures. 

It will be interesting to see the change in ad revenue from this election cycle alone. $1.6 billion was spent on political TV in 2004, far surpassing the $771 million spent in 2000.

The full article is available here.