If the phrases “phase them out,” “hard work,” and “running away from Barack Obama” sound familiar then it’s a pretty good bet you watched programming aired on one of the regions four network television stations over the past few months.
That’s because these messages were the central themes used by Virginia Sen. Phil Puckett, D-Lebanon, who was re-elected, challenger Republican Adam Light and the Republican State Leadership Committee in more than 2,100 advertisements aired on local TV stations this fall as they waged an all-out battle for control of the Virginia Senate.
Records obtained by the Bristol Herald Courier show that Puckett’s re-election campaign spent $317,680 buying enough time to air 1,231 30-second-spots on WJHL, WEMT, WCYB, and WKPT at various times between Sept. 1 and the Nov. 8 election.
Light’s campaign spent $159,895 to run 557 ads on those four stations, while the Republican committee spent $128,090 on 370 30-second spots it purchased on Light’s behalf as part of a bid to take control of the 40-member state Senate from the Democrats and place the state government squarely in GOP hands.
“There was some really big money spent in the Senate campaigns [during the past election cycle] and the television stations loved it,” said Kyle Kondik, a political analyst with the University of Virginia’s Weldon Cooper Center for Politics.
These ad purchases probably played a role in the election’s final results, with Puckett winning his fifth term by beating Light by only 6 percentage points. According to the Virginia State Board of Elections, more than 39 percent of the 38th Senate District’s voters cast their ballots on Election Day.
Buying time
Local stations base their ad prices largely on how many homes with TV households in their particular designated marketing area – a cluster of cities and counties grouped together and monitored by the Nielson Company – are watching one of their shows at a particular date and time. A 30-second spot aired during a popular program, like a prime-time show, costs the most while those aired during less popular programs costs less.
“Let’s say you had all the money in the world,” said Chris Huttman, an ad buyer with LUC Media, an Atlanta-based media company that has worked for several Virginia campaigns and issue groups including Democrat Steve Shannon’s 2009 bid to be the state’s attorney general. “Then you would want to buy as much prime-time advertising as you could.”
But larger companies and groups buy most of the advertising slots available in a prime-time show directly from the network as part of their nationwide advertising campaigns, Huttman said, which gives local stations the ability to sell them to political campaigns at an even greater premium if they choose to sell their limited inventory of prime-time advertising slots to political campaigns at all.
Local stations do, however, control all the advertising slots available in their news broadcasts and syndicated programs like “Inside Edition” and game shows “Jeopardy” and “Wheel of Fortune.” These shows present a bonanza for political campaigns because their advertising rates are cheaper and there are plenty of slots to go around – a key factor given that federal law requires TV stations to offer one candidate access to the same advertising slots as his or her opponent.
“There’s a lot of different ways you can skin the cat,” Huttman said.
Campaigns can spend their money buying a lot of time on local news broadcasts and other programs for which advertising slots are cheaper and more available, he added, or they can buy time on the expensive prime-time shows for which stations sell what few advertising slots they have at a premium.
But whatever strategy a candidate picks, Huttman said, more and more are using the medium. That’s because even though a 30-second spot on a local station’s 6 p.m. newscast costs $425 to air, it reaches the 8 percent to 10 percent of the Tri-Cities Designated Marketing Area’s 323,640 television households that watch these broadcasts every day.
At a bare minimum, this means the candidate is spending less than $500 to reach 25,900 households in the area, Huttman said, which is far less than he or she would spend sending direct mail pieces to these households or paying somebody to call them at certain times of the day. He said the increasing amount of money being spent on political campaigns is only making it easier for candidates to use local TV as a way to put forth their messages.
The strategy
Kondik, the political analyst, said the Republican Party focused its efforts on winning three conservative-leaning state Senate districts as part of its bid to win control of that legislative body from the Democrats during this year’s election cycle. Their efforts were successful in two of these districts: the 20th,, which held by Sen. Roscoe Reynolds, D-Martinsville, and the 17th, held by Sen. Edd Houck, D-Spotsylvania.
“This could have been the 21st seat for the Republicans,” Kondik said of the 38th District, for which Light and Puckett fought tooth and nail.
Had GOP lawmakers won this district as well, he added, they would have earned complete control of the state Senate without relying on Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling, a Republican, to cast a tiebreaking vote.
Kondik said these three districts were chosen because they are in areas where President Barack Obama did not fare as well in the 2008 election as he did in other parts of the state. The president’s declining popularity made it harder for Democrats to keep these districts under their control, he said, and presented Republicans with that much more of an opportunity.
The 20th and 38th districts have another variable in common. Because both are in less affluent and less populated parts of the state, Huttman said, the local TV stations serving these districts sell their available advertising much cheaper than stations in the state’s more populated and affluent regions.
He uses “Glee,” an hour-long program on the Fox Network that was watched by 6.9 million viewers across the country Nov. 8, as a way to illustrate this point. According to records obtained by the Herald Courier, Puckett’s campaign bought a 30-second-spot on this show the week before the election for $875. That same advertising slot would have cost Puckett’s campaign $12,000 to $13,000 had it been from a station in the Washington, D.C., Designated Marketing Area, which includes 2.4 million households in Northern Virginia, Southern Maryland and the nation’s capital.
It makes perfect sense for political leaders and groups to focus their efforts at campaigns in areas where there are cheaper advertising rates, Huttman said, because each state Senate district has the same amount of voters regardless of its location and each district counts the same toward a party’s ability to take over or hang on to a majority in the legislative body they’d like to control.
“I’m sure that the ad buys down-state are far cheaper than they would be in the more populous areas of Virginia,” Kondik said, seconding Huttman’s opinion that state party officials and donors can get more of a bang for their buck when they buy ads for targeted campaigns in smaller markets like the Tri-Cities DMA and the Roanoke-Lynchburg DMA, which is home to 455,860 TV households.
Huttman and Kondik said the region’s residents can expect the number and frequency of campaign ads on local TV to increase even more during the next election cycle because it will feature a presidential race, a U.S. House of Representatives race and a U.S. Senate race. All three will be tightly contested in a year during which the amount of money spent on politics is only going to get higher and higher, they said.
“This is going to be more and more of the norm going forward,” Huttman said. “It’s really a no-brainer for these campaigns to be on broadcast TV.”
gmclean@bristolnews.com
(276) 645-2518
YOU SHOULD KNOW
How many TV ads?
Virginia Sen. Phil Puckett, Republican Adam Light and the Republican Senate Leadership Committee spent a total of $605,665 on TV ads aired on the Tri-Cities Designated Marketing Area’s four local network television stations this fall.
Total ads aired by station and month:
Station Sept. Oct. Nov. Cost
WCYB 124 526 305 $298,555
WJHL 147 249 337 $196,210
WEMT 11 76 64 $63,855
WKPT 40 169 110 $47,045
Total 322 1,020 816 $605,665
Total ads purchased by candidate and month:
Candidate Sept. Oct. Nov. Cost
Puckett 286 578 367 $317,680
Light 36 331 190 $159,895
RSLC 0 111 259 $128,090
Total 322 1,020 816 $605,665
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