Depending on your perspective, the Illinois voter is being either snubbed or done the biggest favor imaginable.
An image war is raging out there, in 30-second volleys, as incumbent President George Bush, Democratic challenger John Kerry and their supporters race to spend the most money ever on one campaign’s political ads.
But the Prairie State’s electorate is being shortchanged of the, um, valuable educational tools that are contemporary political advertisements.
TV viewers in the Land of Lincoln have to watch the national channels to try to catch the Bush campaign’s post-convention touts of the president’s plans for the future, for instance. They might have missed, unless they went online to look for it, Kerry calling on Bush to denounce Kerry’s military de-tractors, the so-called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. They even have probably had to forgo, except via evening-news recaps, the much discussed but little aired ads the Swift boat group produced, accusing Kerry of lying about his Vietnam War military service.
The reason voters in the state have a harder time seeing these spots, of course, is that the campaigns and the outside groups hoping to influence the vote haven’t spent their dollars on local ad buys in the state and may well not do so right up through Election Day. And if they aren’t saturating the local market as well as select national channels, the odds of a viewer seeing it decrease significantly.
Instead, following the ever-more-standard political playbook, the campaigns are micro-targeting, placing money only where it’s likely to do the most good. In a potentially close election such as this one, that has translated to fewer than 20 identified “swing states,” those where the presidential outcome is perceived to be in doubt.
So Illinois voters don’t count, this time around, because they have been, for all practical purposes, counted already, cast firmly in the Democratic camp and therefore not contended for with anything approaching vehemence.
Compared with the 2000 race, “it’s more of the same, but at some point much more of the same matters,” says Ken Goldstein, director of the Univer-
‘We’ve never seen so much so early so focused.’– Ken Goldstein, director of the University of Wisconsin Advertising Project, which tracks political ads and their placement. “We’ve seen targeting in battleground states becoming a staple. That’s not new. We’ve seen early advertising before. But we’ve never seen so much so early so focused.”
Hundreds of millions of dollars, already, are being spent, in places such as Cleveland and St. Louis. So far, says Goldstein’s group, which uses Nielsen Monitor-Plus data of local ad buys on network-affiliated and national cable channels, presidential campaign TV ads have run locally in just 18 states.
Most of the messages — maybe 60 percent, Goldstein says — aim for the same middle group of undecided viewers via news programs, but from there the placement branches out by channel, by message, by region. Bush likes to appear in mostly more male-skewing climes such as the Golf Channel and the History Channel. Kerry, for the most part, favors women — via the likes of “Judge Judy” — and urban areas.
There seems a broad consensus that the advertising has been undistinguished. “We’ve found plenty to criticize on both sides,” says Brooks Jackson, a former CNN political reporter who now directs the Political Fact Check ad-monitoring project of the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center. “Kerry consistently exaggerates economic data in a way to lay a burden on Bush. . . . Bush, of course, has been distorting Kerry’s voting record from start to finish so far.”
Swift discussion
Only the Swift boat ads have engendered wide discussion and the kind of “free media” replays that can multiply a spot’s effectiveness. The University of Wisconsin study noted in late August that the then-three Swift boat spots accounted for just 739 of the more than 500,000 presidential ads aired since March 3.
Mario Almonte, a cultural trend watcher with New York City’s Herman Associates, argues that as the campaign enters its final months, most new ads will get something approaching the scrutiny and bounce the Swift boat group’s work did.
“The current presidential race is so overheated that the media only needs to hear of an ad that is being considered for airing and they jump on it,” Almonte said in an e-mail interview. “Kerry and Bush can run two-sentence advertisements in local Pennysavers and still be guaranteed national exposure.”
More sophisticated than the Pennysaver strategy, an ultimate form of micro-targeting is not happening this time around, says Claudio Marcus, an executive vice president at Visible World, a New York-based technology firm that happens to offer such a service.
But perhaps by the next midterm election, politicians will start doing what other advertisers are doing already: Use software to send out one demographically flexible ad simultaneously to, for instance, the 44 distinct cable “zones” in the city of Chicago, Marcus says, and achieve “a further level of granularity.” The Latino areas might get a candidate sounding liberal on education, conservative on “moral” issues, he says, while the seniors would hear about the candidate’s plan to fix Medicaid.
2 in 5 voters
Of course, all of this now and future targeting raises the obvious question, especially in such ignored, yet believed to be otherwise important, states as Illinois, New York and California. Is it fair that only 2 in 5 of the country’s voters get to see the full display of how a candidate chooses to spend his money in dressing up himself or dressing down his opponent?
“How sad that we’re asking that question, because the ads are either feel-good or feel-bad. In either sense, they’re probably a disservice,” says Glenn Kessler, managing partner of HCD Research in New Jersey, a Web-based advertising research and marketing company. In his firm’s regular testing of the current political ads, “any ones that show depth are likely to score poorly, but those that show emotion score highly. So the winners are the [viewers] in the 33 non-battleground states.”
Granted, viewers in ad-barren regions may not be clamoring for their nightly news to suddenly come with an onslaught of Kerry-in-Vietnam spots, but some critics are at least wondering about the absence. Those folks “want it both ways,” Goldstein says. “Everybody whines about political advertising, then when they don’t get any political advertising they whine about it.”
At least two advertising experts note that something may be lost in limiting political advertising to places thought to be in play.
“It may be effective as marketing,” says Arthur Kover, former editor of the Journal of Advertising, now a Yale Management Fellow. “But what’s happening is larger political issues are being cut out for point issues. What you lose is where these guys are really going.”
New York ad woman Linda Kaplan Thaler, who created the 1992 Bill Clinton biographical spot featuring him shaking hands with John F. Kennedy, frames the discussion of targeting another way: “Yes, you’re going to find more of that. You will find in every aspect of communication and marketing, whether it’s the president or a loaf of bread, that you can literally advertise to one person in an apartment building and somebody down the hall will see a different ad. But without an overriding theme or brand image” — a national campaign — “it doesn’t stick.
“It’s like cooked spaghetti. It has to stick to the wall.”
In a place like Illinois, this time out, it’s not even being thrown at the wall.
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Tribune television critic Steve Johnson is on a leave of absence through June. During that time, he will write periodically about media trends and issues.
