Opinion: But first, these important (and expensive) messages

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Great news for TV stations in Iowa and New Hampshire. So get your finger on that Fast Forward button.

Advertising for candidates started early this year and it’s speeding up in the last couple of weeks with Chris Dodd and John Edwards ramping up their spending. Barack Obama started his Iowa ad buys June 27.

According to a new study just out by Nielsen Monitor Plus, which, guess what, monitors competitive advertising, former Mass. Gov. Mitt Romney leads all candidates with 4,549 ads in seven markets, most on local TV, especially in Iowa. (Except for some modest national cable ad buys by Romney, Iowa stations are getting 82% of the TV ad business so far compared to 18% in New Hampshire.)

Romney’s ad numbers are more than all the other candidates combined. (Bill Richardson and Dodd come in second and third.) Romney started advertising a full 622 days before the November 2008 election. (But he wasn’t the earliest; George W. Bush bought some ads 821 days before the November 2000 election.)

Nor was Romney the first this cycle. California Republican Duncan Hunter went up three days before. But Hunter’s ads have focused on seeking donations and volunteers. After a brief period of bio ads, Romney moved right into his I-am-a-conservative message. So heavy has Romney’s ad blitz been, that he loaned his campaign over $2 million in the first quarter and hinted last week that he’d done the same again in the last 90 days. Apparently it’s working; he’s doing well in both Iowa and New Hampshire polls.

Rudy Giuliani is taking a different tack--radio. He’s run 642 radio ads in every market Nielsen checks, while Romney’s run 378 radio ads focusing on New Hampshire and central Florida. Giuliani’s ad buys were in most major U.S. markets focusing on Kansas City, Minneapolis-St. Paul and Providence.

In terms of new media, Democrats easily lead in what Nielsen calls ‘buzz,’ online mentions in blogs and discussion groups. Newcomer Obama is the big Democrat buzzer (despite little online advertising) with twice the volume of Hillary Clinton. Interestingly, though he trails in polls and fundraising, Sen. John McCain is the leading Republican buzz-getter, in part due to his heavy online ad spending.

McCain had more than 40 million unique impressions in April and May in paid Internet advertising followed distantly by Romney with 5.8 million. But McCain had only the fourth most-visited candidate website. Obama rules in that category with four million page views from 650,000 unique visitors in April. Clinton, spending much less, came in second in visits through her website team’s clever use of the campaign song contest and the Sopranos video spoof.

Cut to black.

--Andrew Malcolm