Obama “Adjusts” Ad Buys
By Bud White on August 23, 2008 at 4:00 PM in Advertising, Barack Obama, Florida, John Kerry, John McCain, Ohio
“Follow the money,” is the famous advice from Deep Throat, Woodward and Bernstein’s key Watergate source. The Associated Press is reporting, in an article titled “Obama Adjusts Ad Strategy During Convention,” that Obama is pulling ads from certain Red States. The key word, of course, is “adjust.” This is a familiar euphemism for pulling ads from states where those ads cannot move the numbers, and the media advisers always say it’s temporary.
Barack Obama began scaling back TV advertising for the convention week, pulling ads in Republican strongholds in the South and Mountain West to concentrate on ad wars with rival John McCain in battleground states.
~ snip ~
Democratic and Republican officials familiar with Obama’s ad purchases said the campaign had decided to pull ads from Alaska, Indiana, Georgia, North Carolina, Montana and North Dakota during next week’s convention. Two Democratic officials, speaking not for attribution because they were not authorized to discuss ad strategy, said the campaign intends to return to those state airwaves the following week.
In 2004, Kerry’s team also attempted to change the map. They ran two biographical spots in states which they hoped to turn blue. Factcheck.org reported in May of that year that:
According to the Kerry campaign, the ads will appear in 19 battleground states: Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Louisiana, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Washington, West Virginia and Wisconsin. The Associated Press said the buy was the largest so far by any candidate in the 2004 campaign, and would exceed the $17 million spent by Kerry since he wrapped up the Democratic nomination two months previously. Kerry strategist Tad Devine called it “the most ambitious media campaign in the history of presidential politics.” (emphasis added)
By Labor Day, Kerry had ceased ad buys in nearly all the Red States listed above:
Democrats all but wasted about $40 million by advertising in GOP-leaning states they had hoped to put in play before giving up – Arkansas, Arizona, Colorado, Louisiana, Missouri, North Carolina and Virginia. Still, buying airtime there forced Bush’s campaign to spend at least $25 million defending those states.
That $40 million would have probably made the difference for Kerry in Ohio, Iowa, Nevada, New Mexico, and perhaps moved the numbers in Missouri.
In addition to running ads in crimson Red States, Obama has squandered big money in Florida. Last week, The Huffington Post confidently proclaimed “Obama’s Florida Dominance: 9,785 More Ads.”
In Florida’s living rooms, the presidential contest so far has been a landslide — Barack Obama, 9,785; John McCain, zero….The Obama campaign has spent about $6.5 million on TV advertising in Florida, according to the Campaign Media Analysis Group, a unit of media tracker TNS Media Intelligence. In part, the spending can be attributed to the Democrat’s late start there. He refrained from campaigning in Florida during the primary season after the Democratic Party penalized the state for holding its primary early.
Obama’s ads in Florida — and elsewhere as the A.P. article obliquely suggests — have been wasted dollars. Despite the onslaught in Florida, McCain is leading Obama in the Sunshine State. Floridians, it seems, have tired of intentional disenfranchisement, and Obama’s disingenuous letter asking for the state’s full seating at the DNC was just another example of Obama’s slickness. Charles Lemos writes:
(SUSA) has a new poll out today that shows McCain enjoying a comfortable six point margin. That margin is slightly more than Bush’s five point win in 2004. Not a bad place to be…Most polls heretofore have shown Florida as in the “leaning Democratic” or “slightly Democratic” column so these new polling results are either an outlier or suggest a shift in the race. Coupled with other polls, both nationwide and in individual states, the trend seems to be the latter. There is a discernible if nascent shift in the race. It is now increasingly evident that in the past fortnight despite the “glory that was Baghdad, the awe that was Berlin” that support for Obama has eroded.
Buried at the bottom of a long paragraph in the A.P. article was this gem of information:
Obama has already pulled ads in Miami, but there were conflicting reports on whether he planned to silence his ad presence in the rest of Florida.
It seems Obama is not the map-changer for which Dr. Dean had been planning.
by Ronald Scott
* More novels by 
* 
(
)
- You'll have access to 18 million movies, TV shows, songs, magazines, and books, as well as ultra-fast Web browsing with Amazon Silk -- faster than iPad. Full e-mail and document access and a keyboard. Fire can transmit what is on your screen onto a connected TV or monitor without an accessory. It runs Flash (iPad doesn't). 
Pingback: The Donner Party « Not Your Sweetie