Fri 10 Oct 2008
Barack Obama Buys Primetime
Posted by Jason D. under Advertising, TV
This one has me thinking maybe I’ve donated too much to the Obama campaign. ’Senator Barack Obama has become the first presidential candidate in 16 years to buy a half-hour of prime time network television for a campaign infomercial.’ Come Wednesday, Oct. 29, a week before the election, Obama has completed deals with CBS and NBC to show a half-hour program about his candidacy. Fox is on the fence because if there is a game six of the World Series he’d be out of luck, and ABC has yet to finalize a deal but is expected to shortly.
Maybe since I wasn’t alive when television first came out and ‘half-hour commercials were far more common during the early days of television’ that explains why I had no idea JFK did this and Nixon bought two hours of time on election eve in 1968. Then the cost was $400,000. Now it is predicted that each network would have generated around $1 million in commercial revenue for these half-hour time slots so the total bill for the Obama campaign could be easily north of $4 million. Luckily for Obama the networks are forced to keep to the ‘lowest unit cost’ for all political ads as required under federal law (that gets a little complicated but basically politicians get the lowest rate a network has sold for the particular show they are buying). The last time this happened was by billionaire turned politician Ross Perot in 1992.
No word on whether John McCain will also try this same buy, but due to his restrictions in spending from taking federal money he might not have the funds for such a costly maneauver.
October 11th, 2008 at 7:20 pm
as you can see from that fact that I have less hair than y’all and more wrinkles…I am older.
But I remember watching the Dukakis half-an-hour special the week before the election in 1987.
I also remember the Perot infomercial complete with pie-charts and graphs on an easel.
Clearly these cost a great deal of money in their day, but neither of these men became president.
Gov. Palin used the VP debate as an infomercial (openly admitting she’d be ignoring the moderator and ‘talkin straight to the American people’) and her campaign didn’t pay for those 90 minutes on every broadcast network and the cables newsers too.
Buying this kind of ad time won’t win Sen. Obama this election, however…if he’s got the support and he’s raised the money…why not do everything he can afford to to ensure he does win? That’s why people donated to his campaign in the first place?