Posted on 10/06/2012 9:19:37 PM PDT by County Agent Hank Kimball
OK, I don't watch a lot of regular network programming. Here's what I watch:
Major Legue Baseball
College and NFL Football
FoxNews
Occasional reruns of Frasier, which appear on the Hallmark Channel I believe.
My wife, however, watches various things on Bravo like those insipid Real Housewife shows, Top Chef, etc. (Yes, I know...) and Lifetime Channel.
Neither of us have seen a SINGLE Romney ad in weeks. Not one. I have seen dozens of Obama ads, and they appear to be generating new ones all the time. The most recent, today, was a rebuttal to the debate featuring Andrea Mitchell, and I saw that at least 3 times today alone.
Are the Romney people doing ANY advertising on national cable channels? I'm not kidding when I say I've seen not one, and neither has my wife.
Are they saving their money for a big election-nigh party? Spending it on consultants?
I must admit I'm at a loss.
Hank
It is accurate. I am not in a battleground state but I am seeing the ads on cable networks - and they are national ads, not locally through the system (you can tell the difference due to picture / audio being slightly different). I don’t personally have cable but when I visit someone who does I have seen quite a few ads on networks like TV Land.
Anyway, it isn't feasible to buy a national ad-buy just to pick up people using Satellite on a very frequent basis. It's too expensive and the dish cohort overlap with the undecided cohort is too small. By far the largest number of people who'll see the ad a) don't matter or b) have already seen it a zillion times.
On digital cable networks, I highly doubt you can tell the difference.
You live in Texas. We are not a battleground state. Why should he waste his money? He’s not Obama. Just because Zero is stupid enough to run ads here doesn’t mean jack.
Makes no sense for me to see Obama ads in dark red West Texas, but I have.
Yah, how dare they not run ads in Texas! :/
Hank, is it smart to spend money on 35-40 states where the election will not be decided, or to target the handful of MUST WIN AT ALL COST states? Do you want to elect a dope or a smart guy? If Romney does what you want, he is a dope. I personally have had enough of having a dope in the top spot. How about you?
Hi, all - I’m a long time lurker here at FR... perhaps I can help clear this up. I sell TV advertising for a living and have worked in both local cable and local broadcast TV.
TV advertising can be purchased at the local, regional or national level (or some combination of all three). For example, in the auto industry local clients are the area dealerships (”Orlando Ford”), regional clients are the regional dealer associations (”Southeastern Ford Dealers”) and the national clients are the manufacturers (”Ford”).
Presidential elections, as others have mentioned, boil down to the states (and specific areas within those states) where the candidates are competitive with each other... so, it is generally considered a waste of money for them to buy TV ads at the national level. In states like Texas and California where there is no contest, it is also a waste of money for either Romney or Obama buy local or regional TV ad slots.
Since you have DirecTV, the only local ads you can see would be from your local broadcast TV stations. Otherwise, you are only seeing national (or perhaps regional) ads on the “cable networks” you receive via satellite. Unlike local hardwired cable systems (like Time Warner, Comcast, etc.), the satellite dish companies do not have a way to “insert” ads at the local level.
Why Obama would be running national TV advertising I don’t know - maybe his media buyers feel it is still cost effective on the national “cable networks” despite him having no chance in some parts of the country (like Texas).
I’d say that Floridians watch TV at home a great, great deal more than while traveling. During the election cycle they might see 100 ads at home but probably more like 2 or 3 while out-of-state. What’s more relevant in that scenario, the local or the national?
Besides this, I know many Floridians who actually do not leave the state very often. My brother, for example, most often vacations within the state (it is a tourist haven after all).
As far as out-of-state relatives and friends calling them up and trying to influence people in swing states based on ads they saw in their own states—well, I just think targeting the ads to the people in the swing states themselves would be a lot more direct and practical, not to mention I would imagine a lot more likely to work than some sort of second-hand pitch.
Why Obama is advertising in TX, I don’t know. It seems pretty foolish and wasteful to me. I hope he keeps it up. I’m sure he wants to win the popular vote too, but it really isn’t the most important thing. I just hope Romney keeps his eye on the electoral college instead. (I do feel sorry for your inundation with Obama ads though—I’m sure it is annoying.)
National networks run local ads just like any other network. Typically, networks will have a percent set of ad time set aside for running national ads, and a percent they have for local ads. If they don’t get local ads, they run more national ads.
I’m in FL. Trust me, I see the ads everywhere and on every channel from Romney...
Romney has a decent chance in Wisconsin.
Republicans and conservatives have accused Romney of much. Time will tell if it's justified. No one can sensibly accuse him of incompetence.
Yes, Obama’s crew have been taking in a couple of hundred million in illegal—unreportable, under $50, online—’donations’ over the last month, just as they did in 2008.
Supposedly some sort of expose of this will hit tomorrow, but it would be surprising if anything actionable came of it.
I would also add it looks like Romney’s money is being invested in ths ground game and the GOTV in the swing states.
I don’t watch TV (just hang out on the web), but most people do. My thought has always been that a presidential candidate SHOULD advertise at the national level, as well as the state levels.
While it’s true that winning Texas by 15 points instead of 25 points gets one the same number of electors, being up in Texas by an extra 10 points brings up one’s national average a point or so and makes the candidate top number look more respectable. It also helps tremendously down-ballot to win a state by an extra 10 points.
I don’t know the cost of advertising nationally, but I suspect that there’s a significant savings at the per-viewer level, just because of the efficiencies of scale. So, the cost to reach 100,000,000 or so voters in the swing states is probably not any higher by advertising nationally, than by going into each market. The one downside with national advertising is that the same ad is seen by everyone - so if you’re Obama and want to talk about all of the high-paying union jobs that you’re saving, that may go over good in Detroit, but not so well in West Virginia (where they’re being forced to shut down coal mines). So you make the ads of the more “feel-good” type for the national market, but you STILL runs the ads.
We won’t even watch anything on local tv anymore unless it can be DVR’d and fast forwarded through the ads. Haven’t watched local news in months just to keep from being bombarded with ads. Sick of em
There’s a house on fire in my neighborhood! Is your house on fire, too?!!!!
They are running Obama ads in California to increase turnout of low information Democrat voters and reap their votes for the public employee union positions on initiatives.
Christ......why would Romney spend money to run ads on FOX? Cmon. Think a little.
There are ads from our East Tennessee TV stations being broad cast into South West Virginia
They began on October 1
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