Candidates Blanket Primary, Caucus States With Ad Avalanche

Campaign ’96 may be the year of the Big Ad Buy. While candidates are shaking hands and courting the media and pushing all the usual political levers, they have also launched a landslide of television advertising in key caucus and primary states.

“I’m 100% sold out this week,” Cheryl Semerad, director of sales and marketing at WHO-TV in Des Moines, says of her space for advertising. “And I still have to provide reasonable access to all presidential candidates so . . . I have to preempt my regular advertisers. Last week alone, 80 regular advertisers had to be bumped out of spots [to make time] for presidential candidates.”

Semerad is not alone. Veteran ad watchers say that already this season, television viewers are seeing more political appeals earlier than ever.

“The number of ads is way up,” says Kathleen Hall Jamieson, dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. “And the speed of the attack and the reply has accelerated to the point that sometimes I wonder whether the makers of these ads have given the electorate the time to digest it all. These campaigns may be moving so fast that they are only talking to each other.”

One reason for this early flood of mostly 30-second spots on local television stations is the shortness of the political season this year. By the end of March, most of the big states will have cast their ballots for the presidential nominations.

Another reason clearly is the “Forbes phenomenon”, as Julie Campasano at WMUR-TV in Manchester, N.H., knows only too well. Shortly before Forbes announced last September that he would make a run at the GOP nomination, a group of his campaign advisors came to visit her.

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“They wanted to do a megabulk buy; that’s what they called it. They wanted tonnage, frequency, and they said, ‘Here’s the money and you help us work out the schedule,’ ” said Campasano, who is in charge of political advertising for the station. “It was carte blanche. It had never happened to me before and never since. They wanted to buy every stitch of advertising they could get.”

Most stations are more than willing to accept political ads, but federal law requires them to parcel out the best positions, making certain that one candidate doesn’t buy the house.

What are these television ads and what are they trying to do? A survey of the political advertising of the major Republican candidates shows a variety of strategies and messages, a few experiments mixed in with a good deal of conventional advertising wisdom, a few missteps and several big hits. Some are positive; many are negative; and a few are both.

Dole, who had been solidly in front of the Republican pack for months, has sought to counter Forbes’ recent jump in the polls with a commercial that criticizes Forbes’ “risky ideas”--his plan for the flat tax, his statements against the balanced budget. The ad quoted a Washington Post story that estimated Forbes economic plan would add $186 billion a year to the federal deficit.

Forbes, whose personal fortune has been estimated at more than $400 million, is using his own money and not taking federal matching funds like other candidates. Because of that, he does not have to abide by federal limits on campaign spending--about $700,000 in New Hampshire and about $1.2 million in Iowa. In the past, campaigns have used about one-half to two-thirds of their allowable spending on advertising.

Although the Forbes campaign does not release details of its ad budget, rival campaigns estimate that he may be spending twice as much as his rivals are allowed to do. One campaign group estimated that since Sept. 22, Forbes has already aired $1.1 million worth of ads in a variety of media in New Hampshire. Since Nov. 27, it was estimated, Forbes has spent about $1.4 million on all advertising in Iowa.

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That budget has allowed Forbes to air several new ads a week. Instead of calling a news conference to attack a fellow candidate, he starts a new ad. For example, when Dole said on CNN that he never voted to increase congressional pensions, Forbes shot back with an ad quoting the Orlando Sentinel as saying that Dole had done so.

Besides the flat tax, the overall theme of Forbes’ advertising is to portray himself as the outsider and the other candidates as insiders. Recently, Forbes aired an ad attacking former Tennessee Gov. Lamar Alexander, who is also running as an outsider. The ad noted that Alexander is associated with a law firm that pays him $295,000 a year and “lobbies for special interests in Washington.”

The Alexander camp denied that Alexander did any lobbying and viewed the attack as a sign that their candidate was beginning to move up in Forbes’ private polls.

Alexander’s television ads, folksy scenes with John Denver-style music, promise good feelings and “not another angry voice from Washington.” Still, on radio last week, Alexander’s staff snarled back at the Forbes people.

The ad features an announcer warning voters that Forbes’ flat-tax plan would benefit the rich and that “Malcolm ‘Steve’ Forbes has a new name--meet Malcolm, the Mudslinger.”

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Gramm’s ads, many of which have featured the candidate’s background, include one that attacks the welfare system, promising that Gramm supports a plan that “requires work . . . and stops paying unwed mothers to have more children.”

The welfare ad made news, drawing criticism for depicting blacks loitering on a street corner as an announcer talked about illegitimate children. However, the ad did not substantially boost Gramm in the polls.

Patrick J. Buchanan, who was known for his biting ads against George Bush in the 1992 primary campaign, has so far limited his commercials to a few that emphasize his conservative credentials.

One ad showing his connections to presidents Reagan and Nixon backfired when it included a picture of the Challenger exploding 10 years ago this month.

Buchanan pulled the frames from the ad in New Hampshire, the home state of teacher Sharon Christa McAuliffe, who was killed in the accident.