Political Ads May Invade Super Bowl

Republican presidential hopeful Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., speaks at Virginia Military Institute in Lexington Va., Wednesday, April 11, 2007. McCain called the four-year Iraq conflict "necessary and just" and accused anti-war Democrats, including the party's top White House candidates, of recklessness. (AP Photo/Don Petersen) (Don Petersen - AP)

WASHINGTON -- Drink beer, eat candy, buy a car. Now add a new pitch to next year's lineup of Super Bowl television ads: Vote for me. Politics? On Super Bowl Sunday?

As states line up to hold presidential primaries on the first Tuesday in February, the Feb. 3 Super Bowl could look super inviting and super expensive to presidential campaigns eager to deliver a knockout punch.

"That is a very ripe and timely target," said Mark McKinnon, chief media strategist for President Bush in 2000 and 2004 and now an adviser to Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign. "It would reach a huge audience at a very critical time. I think campaigns will look very closely at that."

That campaigns would give serious thought to advertising on Super Bowl Sunday illustrates how a packed primary schedule in early February could upend the traditional pace and the time-tested strategies of presidential elections.

New York this week joined California and New Jersey as the Feb. 5 giants, muscling their way up the schedule to accompany the likes of Missouri, Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Delaware, Oklahoma and Utah. But legislatures or governors in Texas, Illinois, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia and several other states also want to be in on the early sweepstakes.

The candidates must first run a three-week gantlet of primaries and caucuses in Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire and South Carolina. To add to their stress levels, Florida now wants to hold its primary on Jan. 29.

For the survivors, that leaves precious little time to campaign across the country and places a greater premium on advertising. The candidates already are raising super-size sums of money to prepare for the accelerated primary pace. Sens. Hillary Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois, both Democrats, and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, a Republican, all reported raising more than $20 million in the first quarter of this year.

"Super Bowl right now? If I had to put the odds on it I'd say they are one in 10 that a campaign would actually go out and do that," said Evan Tracey, chief operating officer at TNSMI/Campaign Media Analysis Group, a company that tracks political advertising. "Before this Feb. 5 primary, those odds would have been one in 1 million."

The Super Bowl aside, candidates, strategists and their media buyers will have difficult choices heading into Feb. 5. A weeklong ad that runs statewide in California or New Jersey, for example, can cost between $2 million and $4 million, depending on how often it airs. Three ads like that could create a serious financial crunch for a campaign.

So the campaigns will have to decide whether to compete region by region, market by market, station by station or whether it's ultimately more efficient to run national network ads, a relative rarity in politics.

Democratic strategist Tad Devine, a top adviser in Al Gore's and John Kerry's presidential campaigns, believes the terrain will be as complicated this time as it was for Michael Dukakis in 1988, when the eventual Democratic nominee had to fend off challengers such as Al Gore and Dick Gephardt. Then, Dukakis ran positive ads in some states, and negative ads in others.

"We're likely to see a similar situation where campaigns will make tactical decisions about what opponents they want to face later in the process," Devine said. "They'll do different thinking in different places. You will not see the one ad being broadcast all over the place."