Gay Pride 2010 - Congressman Anthony Weiner walks in the Gay Pride March, June 28, 2010. (Photo: Boss Tweed/Flickr)
Badly targeted ad buys cost campaigns dollars - and votes
Almost 100 years after Wagner’s election in 1926—among the first campaigns to distribute films to theaters—today’s Democratic Socialists, so-called reformer congressional incumbents, spent 99% of their campaign TV funds outside of their geography without even buying digital’s name brand shows. I’m just missing that genius. But knowing the other side of the camera, the TV stations that get the preponderance of candidate money have to keep them separated from each other–office by office–and maximize their political ad sales by each race, since candidates pay the most for time in their shows. Yet, stations still have to save enough time for their highest paying 52-week advertisers. I saw Toyota, BMW, Kia, Honda and then, finally, Ford run consecutively between the Jets TNF win on Fox 5 and their local news.
I saw an ad on Channel 2’s local news for another Congressional candidate I can’t vote for, Pat Ryan. He’s a Democrat and military veteran running for reelection in Hudson/Ulster Counties. His district is equidistant between NY and Albany County; which has a greater % of eligible voters within the station’s geography, so he needs Albany TV, too.
After looking to see when a candidate who’d run political ads on digital for years, I finally saw them for Rob Menendez for Congress. I communicated with two consultants, asking them about national digital for local TV campaigns. Despite Menendez’ capitalizing on the technology’s ability, neither Latimer nor NY Democratic Socialist incumbents, Bowman nor Ocasio-Cortez, covered a :30 second national digital signal. (The first and last pod positions, the most desirable, are the ones most readily integrated. Menendez’s ad, at the end of a pod, covered a financial institution.) Both strategists, east and west coast, bought ads for local candidates. I asked the New Yorker about why only Menendez covered national digital ads.
Their answer was, “Targeting;” which made me wince. Taking “targeting” to a logical extension, this long-time pro told me that Monk, Cheers and The Office sparked New Jersey’s most likely voters to the polls but not New York’s. The west coast strategist however, a former New Yorker, told me that there were no laws governing digital channels like there are the broadcast stations themselves and estimated that the price to cover national digital ads in local markets–to include New York’s entire tri-state region–was a three, not four figure cost per spot.
The fact of the matter is that congressional candidates for both parties throw money at the same shows. Does [M.I.T.’s] Political Science Department teach that to build an immediate awareness for a candidate’s unique strategic advantage can be drilled into a demography’s collective consciousness by advertising on but 20 of 20,000 TV channels? I’d run my commercial on all 20,000 at a time. And from what I’ve read and seen, Barry Diller seems to agree with me.
Fully aware of the fact that some of 1926’s movie program’s funds were raised through the buying and selling of judgeships, Tammany Hall spent its media campaign funds strictly within the campaign’s geography. Today’s PAC’s funds pay for congressional TV campaigns reaching 1% of the folks who can vote for them on TV shows that reach fewer than 1% of the candidate’s target audience.
In 2002, Andrew Eristoff, a Princeton educated Republican City Councilman, ran for State Senate. His campaign spent noticeable amounts of his campaign dollars such that Tony Dapolito, a long-time Greenwich Village Community Board member said, “I was wondering how many people watching Channel 2 could vote for Andrew Eristoff?”
In 2006, one Campaign Manager heard me out when I told him how to take advantage of TV’s audience shift from broadcast to cable and satellite, “I happen to agree with you,” he said, “But the people in D.C. won’t.”
These days I see former Congressman Anthony Weiner around the neighborhood. One day he wore a Mets cap. I broke the ice with him. After a few chats about the Mets, I asked if he remembered my getting in his face when he ran for Mayor in 2005; that I told him to string his ads along cable. He was feisty back then, but that was then. He nodded and said, “You were right.”
Rewind back to 2002, when a Democratic Congressman got in my face, “What’s it your business how Andrew Eristoff spends his money. I’m having dinner with his parents next week. They’re good friends of mine!” Jerrold Nadler appeared in a 2021 ad on broadcast stations reaching from Middletown, New Jersey to Montauk in the Hamptons, endorsing Brad Lander for city Comptroller. Other so-called reformers endorsing him were Ocasio-Cortez and Elizabeth Warren. As opposed to Eristoff’s personal fortune, Lander, Nadler’s candidate in 2021, bought his TV time with New York City taxpayer money. Should we be glad that 65% of Lander’s one rated ads reached people who couldn’t vote for him?
