"They're simply not cost-efficient anymore," says Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center. "There's no reason to spend money to [address] half the country when you're not campaigning in half the country."
The candidates still buy ads on cable networks, but Jamieson points out that audiences for cable channels are a fraction of those of the four leading broadcast networks: NBC, CBS, ABC and Fox. What's more, about 15 percent of the country cannot get cable or satellite TV. And while about two-thirds of American homes have access to the Internet, it is not clear how many people have watched a campaign ad over a computer.
The polarization of the electorate into "red" and "blue" states has in many ways helped the campaigns map their ad buying. Because a limited number of states are deemed "in play," both campaigns concentrate their resources on relatively fewer lower-cost locales. The ad battle is being contested outside eight of the 10 largest markets -- New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, San Francisco, Boston, Dallas and Houston. Only Philadelphia and Detroit, among the largest markets, have seen sustained advertising.
The Bush and Kerry campaigns declined to discuss their media-buying strategies in detail. But the outlines of their efforts have been apparent for months through tracking services such as TNSMI and Nielsen Monitor-Plus, an arm of the company that does the daily TV ratings.
Campaign media buyers use internal polling research and Nielsen's audience data to figure out where and when to direct their ads. The political ad buyer's world is circumscribed by three essential questions: Who is the advertiser trying to reach? Where do these people live? And what is the most cost-effective time and program to get your message in front of them?
For the most part during an election, two of the answers are easy: older people and informational programs.
"When you're promoting a product like beer or soft drinks or fast food, you're looking for a younger demographic," said Bill Carrick, a veteran Democratic media strategist who most recently advised Rep. Richard A. Gephardt (Mo.). "But a political campaign is almost universally [aimed at] audiences over 35."
By and large, this means buying time on news shows. It helps, Carrick says, that older people watch a lot of television, making them among the easiest-to-reach segments of the electorate. Finding and targeting younger, undecided voters is much tougher. "The very fact that they're undecided usually means they tend to be low on information," he said, "so they're not watching information-oriented shows."
Media buyers think in "dayparts" -- the industry term for the time of day and the type of viewers who tend to watch during those hours. For example, during daytime hours (between 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.) -- a daypart of soap operas, game shows and talk shows such as "Oprah" -- audiences tend to be older, less educated, more downscale and more female.
The late-night audience (11 p.m. to 1 a.m.) skews toward younger crowds, and audiences during "prime access" (7 to 8 p.m.) are typically elderly. Prime time (8 to 11 p.m.) offers the broadest possible audience, but it is also the most expensive daypart, which means it usually commands only about 20 percent of a campaign's TV budget, said Jon Hutchens, a Denver media specialist who is buying airtime for MoveOn, the Media Fund and the AFL-CIO.
Presidential candidates typically pay media buyers 7 to 15 percent of the cost of the airtime they purchase, but this is negotiable and the job is sometimes done on a straight-fee basis.
The Kerry campaign has put a greater emphasis than Bush's on younger and more urban audiences, Tracey said. Kerry has run ads on programs carried by stations affiliated with the WB and UPN networks -- which have younger viewers than affiliates of the major broadcast networks -- and on cable's BET.
As for Bush, says Tracey, his campaign has been an active advertiser on programs with gritty subject matter, such as "NYPD Blue," "Law & Order" and "JAG" -- all of which tend to have a strong appeal to men.
The question, though, is that with so much advertising directed at so few, how much is too much?
Media buyers tend to turn that question around: How can one side stay silent when the other is shouting? They say they must hammer home the message more times now because of the clutter of competing messages and demands for viewers' attention.
In addition to the candidates and the independent groups, the Democratic National Committee and Republican National Committee have media-buying operations, as do the parties' Senate and congressional campaign committees.
"Clutter has a mitigating effect on the effectiveness of any one ad," Hutchens acknowledges. "We're all pretty much selling the same stuff -- education, homeland security, health care. If you're in a hot market, you have a lot of [political organizations] talking about the same things."
