Both Campaigns Scrambling for Votes--and for TV Ad Slots

The carefully scripted national conventions are history. The camera-ready presidential debates are in the can. In the era of made-for-TV politics, there’s one more tradition remaining: the final ad blitz.

The two major candidates and their parties expect to be closely matched on television airwaves in the last two weeks, with each side spending about $20 million. That’s a reverse from the last two weeks, when Democrats were outspent 2 to 1 in television advertising at a time when they slipped in the polls.

From now on, “it’s relatively close,” said Terry Holt, spokesman for the Republican Party.

Media strategists for Al Gore and George W. Bush are also fighting the campaign advertising war with markedly different approaches in the closing weeks of the race. Bush and the GOP are airing perhaps six ads across a wide field of states while Gore and the Democrats are mixing at least 11 different commercials among a similar list of markets.

In most of the 22 states it has targeted, the Republican Party is pouring money behind two ads released Tuesday that criticize Gore as an untrustworthy big spender. Democrats, on the other hand, are broadcasting in 21 states with ads that are specifically written for competitive states such as Florida, West Virginia, Tennessee and Nevada.

Each Campaign Hitting on Basic Themes

In the closing weeks, each side will focus on one or two basic themes. The vice president’s campaign will roll out a series of ads highlighting the nation’s economic prosperity and make the case that the Texas governor would jeopardize it. Bush will emphasize his leadership and portray Gore as the threat to future growth.

Those themes will be pounded home as the two sides empty their bank accounts for giant television buys.

The Republican Party is expected to spend at least $6 million a week, with the Bush campaign matching it. In California, Republicans have been spending about $1.5 million a week. Gore will spend about $6.4 million on TV this week, with the Democrats increasing their weekly cash outlay to more than $4.6 million.

The Republican budget for advertising will be limited because the airwaves are too saturated with local, state and national candidate ads for the GOP to spend all of its money on television. The Republican Party reported $45 million to spend in the last month of the campaign--on everything from voter mobilization to advertising--compared with the Democratic Party’s $25 million.

“They may have more money than God, but there’s only 500 [television rating] points that will get on the air,” said Jennifer Backus, spokeswoman for the Democratic National Committee.

Both sides will also broaden the reach of their ads, reflecting an unusually tight race where the candidates are still close in several critical states.

In the 10 days ending Oct. 18, 50% of the two sides’ combined spending went to just five states: Florida, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Washington, according to the tracking firm Campaign Media Analysis Group. In those five states, which account for 98 of the 270 electoral votes needed to win, the two candidates are separated by no more than 4 percentage points in the most recent polls.

Republicans recently expanded their advertising from 17 states to 22, adding several that have gone Democratic in the past, such as California, Minnesota, Nevada, Tennessee, Vermont and West Virginia. Democrats and the vice president, who at one point retreated on ad buys to 15 states, this week unfurled their widest map of the year. They plan to be on the air in 21 states later this week, including in some of the same party strongholds.

That the map includes many Democratic-leaning states suggests Gore is on the defensive, with a key exception: Florida, a must-win state for Bush, where the Texas governor is running even despite outspending the Democrats 3 to 1 for several weeks.

An ad by the Democratic National Committee airing there warns of pollution in Texas waterways, then says, “Imagine Bush’s Texas record in Florida’s Everglades.” Democrats are about to rotate in a new ad on Social Security to appeal to the state’s large senior population.

Record Use of Targeted Approach

Customizing ads to air in certain media markets isn’t a new technique, but the Democrats’ effort this year marks the widest use of so-called selective audience appeals in the history of political ads, according to experts.

“I think we’ve seen many more targeted appeals than what we’ve seen in the past,” said Darrell West, a political science professor at Brown University. “And I think the reason is it’s no longer a national campaign but a bunch of state and local races. . . . The strategy is dictated by the electoral college. We’ll see if it’s a winning strategy or not.”

The approach may be a natural outgrowth of recent changes in the way presidential campaigns purchase their advertising.

In 1992, then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton knocked conventional wisdom by avoiding the major networks and devoting 70% of his ad dollars to purchasing time on local stations, according to the Television Bureau of Advertising. The idea was intended to reach the campaign’s targeted voters without wasting money by broadcasting in areas that had already been decided.

This year, the candidates each have spent nearly 100% of their ad war chests on local broadcast TV. To place the ads, media buyers working for the candidates place orders with sales firms representing clusters of individual stations.

Republicans have tailored messages to an extent--airing Spanish-language ads focusing on education in California, New Mexico and Florida, for example. (Gore also released a Spanish-language commercial this week.) A senior GOP official said the party is preparing an ad for the Las Vegas market to respond to a Democratic commercial warning that a Bush presidency would bring a nuclear waste dump to Nevada.

But Republicans say the glut of different ads by the Democrats is a sign of weakness.

“They’ve got a whole box of Band-Aids and they’re applying them to all the parts of their body that have damage,” said Holt.

Backus said the tailored ads work because it takes “the right message to break through” the haze of political ads on the air in heavily contested markets, noting Gore has maintained his lead in Washington state, where the Democrats had aired a spot suggesting Bush’s environmental record would shroud Seattle in smog.

One of the critical challenges for advertising strategy in the final weeks is to find effective slots on the saturated airwaves that are left to purchase.

Any time a candidate for federal office buys a commercial slot, federal law requires TV stations to reserve a slot for that candidate’s opponent. The law doesn’t provide the same protection to political parties, however. So as House and Senate candidates who had been holding back begin flushing money into paid media, the national political parties may find it harder to obtain slots.

“We are definitely going to have inventory problems,” said John Yost, ad traffic manager at WBRE in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. “This is the worst we’ve ever seen it. We can’t imagine what they’ll do next time, especially if any of this stuff works.”