Why Web Campaign Spending Trails TV

WHY WEB CAMPAIGN SPENDING TRAILS TV
[SOURCE: Wall Street Journal, AUTHOR: Emily Steel emily.steel@wsj.com]
Amid the gloomy forecasts for next year's ad market, there is at least one bright spot: political advertising. Candidates, political parties and issue groups are expected to spend a record $3 billion on ads this election season, thanks in part to the unusual number of tight local races, says Campaign Media Analysis Group, which tracks politics and public affairs advertising. But as spending grows, one thing that hasn't changed much is how money is spent. Despite the hoopla about online advertising, the Web is expected to get only a very small slice of campaign spending in 2008, says Evan Tracey, founder and chief operating officer of Campaign Media Analysis, part of TNS Media Intelligence, a firm that tracks advertising. In fact, the best way to reach voters in the run-up to elections is still the old way -- via local broadcast television, he says. That's creating a scramble for TV ad time in unexpected places, like Paducah, Ky., and Charleston, W.Va. Why? "Even presidential elections turn into 18 or 20 state battlegrounds that are often waged right down to the county-by-county level. If any business -- let's say dog food -- had to run on a cycle where you could only get your customers once every other year, and you had one day when they had to pick between your brand and somebody else's brand and whichever brand had 51% of the market won, you would want to have a medium that is best situated to essentially drive up the volume and get voters to notice you and customers to notice you. That has always been television."
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