Davis Tailors His Barrage of TV Spots

Garry South grinned as he scrolled down page after page of television shows on his computer screen: “Frasier,” “Everybody Loves Raymond,” “60 Minutes II.” South, chief architect of the Gray Davis reelection campaign, was scanning a log showing where television ads had been run by the governor and his Republican challenger, Bill Simon Jr.

On one day in August, it showed, a Davis spot depicting Simon as a shady businessman had run at least 178 times.

That same day, Simon broadcast not a single ad.

Since June, the Democratic governor has swamped his rival with more than $30 million in television ads, roughly triple what Simon has spent on TV. But that is just one of the distinctions in how the campaigns have waged their most public battle.

Television ads are the weapon of choice in California elections, the sole strategic imperative big and broad enough to capture the attention of the state’s 15 million registered voters.

For Davis, that has meant targeting each of California’s diverse voting blocs with a precisely choreographed sequence of TV spots, market-tested by a tightknit ad team with cash at its disposal.

For Simon, it has meant scrambling, at times, for the money to buy even a minimal presence on the air, even as two teams of ad-makers clash over who has the candidate’s permission to buy time on TV stations.

The sophistication of the Davis ad strategy is partly a luxury of the governor’s huge financial edge over Simon.

From June to mid-October, Davis spots aired more than 26,000 times in the state’s five biggest media markets; Simon’s ran fewer than 5,000, according to the governor’s ad tracking service.

The Davis ad budget has grown steadily to more than $3 million a week -- roughly twice the usual weekly cost needed to gain voters’ attention. It will hit $4 million for the final week, South said. Davis has been able to buy 30-second spots on the World Series and top-rated prime-time shows. In Los Angeles last week, those included NBC’s “ER” ($52,250) and “Friends” ($47,500).

Simon, who has loaned his campaign $5.25 million in recent weeks to keep it from going broke, has put the bulk of his ads on less expensive news shows, which are also saturated with Davis spots. Among Simon’s sparse prime-time buys in Los Angeles this month have been 30-second spots on NBC’s “Law & Order” ($28,500) and CBS’ “60 Minutes” ($18,000). Simon spokesmen said he, too, has run spots during the World Series, but only outside Los Angeles.

Ed Rollins, senior consultant to Simon, said his campaign was essentially “limping” to election day. Given the Davis attack ads and Simon’s “stumbles and the missteps,” donors were “not investing as heavily as we would have hoped,” he said.

Beyond the money shortage, Simon’s ad effort has also been hampered by staff turmoil. Republican leaders in Washington were so put off by his early TV spots that they forced him to replace media strategist Sal Russo, according to four party sources.

Over the summer, Russo repeatedly took Simon spots off the air before large numbers of voters had seen them. That churn angered Republican leaders -- and struck Davis advisors as “idiotic,” as South put it.

“You might as well be taking cash and throwing it out the window,” South said. “You’re wasting the money.”

National GOP leaders also disliked Russo’s ads on Davis’ aggressive fund-raising. The party threatened to withhold Republican National Committee money unless Simon bounced Russo, the sources said. So Simon hired Larry McCarthy, a Washington media consultant, to produce the rest of the ads and buy time from TV stations.

But the transition has been rough. Russo’s Sacramento firm, which stood to lose hundreds of thousands of dollars in commissions on Simon’s ad buys, told TV stations that it remained Simon’s only ad buyer. Rollins, Simon’s senior consultant, then told the stations in a terse letter that McCarthy’s ad buyer was the only one authorized to place the campaign’s commercials.

“Does the RNC like Larry more than me? I’m sure they do,” Russo said. “I’m not a Washington insider.”

In the end, McCarthy prevailed as the ad guru, but Russo remains a top Simon advisor.

Although the Davis campaign tracks every spot Simon runs in big broadcast markets, advisors to the GOP candidate say they try nonetheless to keep their rival off guard. For that reason, Simon’s campaign has declined to provide details on its ad strategy.

At times, the Simon campaign has made inaccurate public statements about its ads. In an Aug. 21 press release, Russo said the campaign would “remain on the air for the remainder of the election.” But Simon later pulled all of his ads -- and kept them off the air for weeks.

In contrast to the Simon teams, Davis has stuck with the same group that propelled him to victory in 1998. The main players are South, pollster Paul Maslin, and media consultants David Doak and Tom O’Donnell.

It is a team with deep faith in focus groups. Before any Davis spot goes on the air, his advisors test it with at least two of them -- usually one with 11 men and another with 11 women. Maslin screens the ads and leads the discussion to gauge voter reaction.

Davis has used focus groups for all his TV spots since 1992, when he created an uproar by running an ad -- untested -- that likened rival U.S. Senate candidate Dianne Feinstein to convicted tax cheat Leona Helmsley, the New York hotel magnate. The resulting furor nearly ruined Davis’ career.

In late May, focus groups saw the first spots savaging Simon’s resume. They confirmed what the Davis team suspected: Corporate scandals had created a toxic political climate for rich businessmen seeking public office for the first time -- in other words, candidates like Simon. Focus groups watched the spots and “deserted” Simon, South said.

“People were not willing to give the so-called successful businessman the benefit of the doubt,” he said.

A few weeks later, Davis went on the air with his first anti-Simon ad. It blamed him for the taxpayer bailout of an S&L.;

But even then, Davis took no chances. The ad ran for two weeks in Los Angeles; only after Davis took a poll confirming that it hurt Simon did the governor start broadcasting the ad in San Diego and San Francisco, South said.

Throughout the campaign, Davis has varied his ads by region.

In coastal cities where voters lean left, he has trumpeted his support of abortion rights, gun control and the environment. Inland, where voters tilt right, he has ignored those topics and marketed his denial of parole to incarcerated killers and the Bronze Star he earned in Vietnam.

“Certain things are going to work better in certain places, so you emphasize it a little more,” Maslin said.

Davis ran a spot on Simon’s oil-industry ties only in Santa Barbara, Monterey and other coastal markets where many voters oppose offshore oil drilling.

In San Francisco, the media market most friendly to Democrats, Davis has run fewer anti-Simon ads, preferring instead to polish his image with positive spots.

In Los Angeles, the state’s most expensive market for advertising, Davis has used cable TV to reach key voting blocs. More than four in 10 California voters live in the L.A. broadcast market. Viewers are mainly moderate or liberal, so Davis has run his coastal ads on Los Angeles stations.

But in outlying areas of the market -- Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties -- voters tend to be more conservative. There, Davis has used local cable systems to run the same tough-on-crime and veterans spots that he broadcast in the Central Valley.

One reminds viewers of the governor’s “duty and service” in Vietnam before slamming Simon for not voting, refusing to release his tax returns (he eventually did) and suing the government to recoup his investment in the failed S&L.; Among the channels where Davis placed the ad were Fox News, popular among conservatives, and ESPN, watched mainly by male sports fans, including veterans.

“You try to talk to people about the things they care about,” said Jim Margolis, a media consultant who used similar cable techniques for U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer in 1998. “If you were saying different things to different people on the same issue, then you might run into a problem.”

Simon’s money problems have limited not only the visibility of his ads but his flexibility in tailoring them to diverse voting blocs. Aside from a slightly higher concentration of ads in San Diego -- to exploit Davis’ unpopularity in the region hit hardest by the California energy crisis -- the Simon campaign has done no regional targeting of its spots, Russo said.

Simon has also run relatively few ads in San Francisco in the final weeks of the race. Despite pockets of conservatives and moderates around the Bay Area, “it’s an inefficient place for a Republican to advertise in the best of circumstances,” Rollins said.

Over the summer, when Simon had few ads on broadcast television, his campaign did run cable spots. But they were geared less to voters than to “our donors and the chattering class -- to show them that we’re in the race, that we have something up,” Rollins said.

Despite being outgunned for months, the Simon team is buoyed by Davis’ failure to boost his popularity much -- even if his attack ads have driven Simon’s poll ratings down. Davis advisors said last week they would stick with positive ads for the rest of the campaign, but resumed the attack spots on Friday.

Simon’s ads also remain negative. Rollins said the spots simply remind voters “why they don’t like Davis” and urge them to “take a second look at Bill.”