cable

A deeper look at the Democrats' TV ad spending in Pennsylvania yields a significant validation of an argument NDN and the New Politics Institute have long been making.

As Gail Shister wrote for the Philadelphia Inquirer, candidates are beginning to increase their spending on cable advertising.

Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama together will spend close to $5 million on TV ads in the closing week before the state's Democratic presidential primary Tuesday.

Philadelphia stations will take in more than $2.5 million of that total, including $445,000 spent on cable - an impressive 17 percent. Cable's average for the five weeks running up to the primary is even more impressive: 22 percent.

Nationally, cable accounts for about 20 percent of political ads this election cycle, experts say, up sharply from the 2004 presidential campaign.

Then, candidates bought cable time "to an embarrassingly low extent," Gallagher says. "They didn't understand we were able to deliver such power for them."

A greater interest in cable isn't suprising given cable's ability to provide much more granular targeting than broadcast. In the same piece, Evan Tracy, a panelist for our upcoming April 24 Reimagine Video event, sums up this point nicely saying, "Cable sells by the pint. Broadcast sells by the gallon."

Turning to the content of the advertising, Hillary's latest ad is very much in keeping with the uniformly strident tone the campaign has been taking in the final days leading up to the Pennsylvania primary. Thematically in harmony with her now notorious 3 A.M. ad, "Kitchen" repackages the readiness question. It begins with the narrator describing being the US president as "the toughest job in the world" while we are shown images of past US crises. Our attention is then brought to the current slew of challenges facing our nation ending with, "If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. Who do you think has what it takes?" Presumably the implication is that Hillary does have what it takes, turning on its head the demeaning sexist quip that Hillary should be relegated to the kitchen by inferring that yes, she should be in the kitchen, because it is a very hot kitchen and no one else can handle it.

Of course Hillary isn't the only one on the attack. In a break from the generally positive tone of the Obama camp's Pennsylvania ads thus far, "Afford", which began airing on Saturday, goes after Hillary's health care plan. The ad focuses on the same critique we have heard Obama lodge in debates, charging that people who can't afford health care will be penalized. (Another Obama ad, "Reason" also begin airing in Pennsylvania on Saturday.)

Television, the dominant media of politics, is going through historic and profound change. More people watch cable today than broadcast. By the end of the year about a third of all homes will have a DVR, and 60 percent of those with a DVR skip all television commercials. More and more people are watching commercial TV on the web. The big TV networks are moving to a year round schedule. And of course there is much much more....

To discuss all this the New Politics Institute is bringing together leading private sector practitioners to discuss the profound and historic ways the dominant media of politics - television - is changing.

Joining us will be:

Todd Juenger, Vice President & General Manager, Audience Research and Measurement at TiVo, leads TiVo’s Audience Research and Measurement business, which provides advertisers, brand groups, and programmers with detailed insight into how TiVo viewers consume and interact with television programming and advertisements. Todd led the development of Stop||Watch, the only ratings service to provide program and specific commercial ratings, on both a Live and Timeshifted basis. He also oversees TiVo’s internal market research and market testing activities.

Tara Walpert, President of Visible World, Inc., is an acknowledged thought leader in the areas of media, marketing, and client services. She comes to Visible World from McKinsey & Company, where she was an Associate Partner and a leader of the firm's Global Media & Entertainment and Sales & Marketing practices. Over the past decade, Tara has helped a wide range of industry leaders in television, print, direct mail, new media, and retail to develop and implement new approaches to sales, marketing, and CRM based on both traditional capabilities and recent technology-enabled innovations. Tara has an AB in Economics from Harvard University and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Simon Rosenberg, President and Founder of NDN and the New Politics Institute.

We hope you will join us on Thursday, April 24th at 12pm. The event will take place in the ballroom at the Phoenix Park Hotel, 520 N Capital St. NW, Washington, DC. Click here to RSVP.

If you have questions, please contact Courtney Markey at 202-544-9200 or cmarkey@ndn.org

In the meantime, check out the following suggested readings: NPI New Tools Memo: Buy Cable Smart, NPI New Tools Campaign Checklist, Viral Video in Politics: Case Study in Creating Compelling Video, "The 50-Year Strategy".

This quote comes from yet another Times piece taking a look at the how the important tool of modern advocacy, television, is being reinvented.

In our work at NPI we've written a great deal about how the hegemony of broadcast television is being challenged by the rise of cable and satellite, digitial video recording devices and other new powerful tools like mobile phones, google search ads and youtube. This article takes a look at how the very economic model of what we have known as "TV" is changing.

Learning about how this very important advocacy tool - TV - is changing needs to be high priority for all of us in the progressive movement, for TV has been the primary tool of political advocacy for the last 40 plus years. The big picture here is that video itself is in the process of being liberated from the monopoly distribution of broadcast, and is increasingly being distributed through satellite, cable, mobile phones and the internet, and thus is becoming much more ubiquitous, accessable and commonplace. There is perhaps no more important and more radical change in modern advocacy than what is happening to what we know as "TV" - and there is much more to come.