Does political TV advertising work?

Armed with an unprecedented $600 million war chest, Sen Barack Obama (D-IL) is flooding the zone with ads in the presidential campaign's home stretch, including a half-hour primetime political infomercial Oct. 29 that will air on multiple networks. Without putting too fine a point on it, if that aerial assault doesn't help the Democratic nominee close the deal, it would seem to be bad news for network sales operations, which have long clung to the pitch that their medium -- beleaguered and battered as it is -- remains the best marketing tool ever devised. The deflating message for television if Sen Obama loses will be that his advertising avalanche didn't yield the intended result -- raising new red flags about TV's ability to move a product, diluted as it is by digital video recorders, ad-skipping and overall fragmentation.