University of Wisconsin researchers released a report Thursday indicating a huge boom in political advertising in the states of Iowa and New Hampshire, as compared to previous presidential elections.
Wisconsin Advertising Project researchers said in the 2000 campaign, candidates aired 852 television commercials in Des Moines, Iowa, before the primaries, while so far this year candidates have aired 4,448 advertisements in Des Moines.
“The No. 1 driving force in the amount of ads aired is how competitive a race is and how crowded a race is,” Joel Rivlin, a Wisconsin Advertising Project researcher, said.
Rivlin said the Democratic candidates’ advertisements as a whole portrayed a positive tone at the beginning of the campaign, then switched into attacks on President George W. Bush and, more recently, on each other.
The attacks focus primarily around Bush’s tactics overseas, Rivlin said, with the most critical ad, aired by John Kerry, showing Bush in front of an aircraft carrier with banner text to the effect of “mission not accomplished.”
“People think Midwest states don’t like negative ads,” Rivlin said. “But last election, Iowa had the most negative ads in the country.”
He said that Bush has not spent a penny under his own name on television advertising, and that Democratic candidate Howard Dean has spent the most on TV ads, totaling $2,793,000.
So far Dean is the only candidate to run television commercials in Wisconsin and the only candidate even “close to spending in lots of markets” other than Iowa and New Hampshire, according to Rivlin.
Candidate John Edwards has spent the second-largest amount on ads, followed by Kerry and then Richard Gephardt. Wesley Clark and Joe Lieberman have each spent less than $250,000 on ads thus far, but both have chosen not to compete or campaign in Iowa’s caucus.
So far all the candidates have personally paid for their marketing, although organizations like the Sierra Club and the AFL-CIO have run general commercials criticizing President Bush.
The Wisconsin Advertising Project, headed by political-science professor Ken Goldstein, has received national attention with its data on television ads, earning coverage in the New York Times and transmission via the Associated Press to dozens of newspapers spanning the United States.
According to Rivlin, the project is the only organization in the country that analyzes every single political ad aired by candidates. It obtains its information through the TNS Media Intelligence/CMAG group — a communications group that compiles the ads. He said the researchers ask between 70 and 80 questions of each ad, looking at factors like the ad’s sponsor as well as the content.
Project researcher Taylor Patterson, a UW senior and political-science major, said the group is primarily funded through the Pew Charitable Fund.
“We’re the only organization that has the funding to do this,” Patterson said. “It’s exciting to get so much coverage, and it warrants this much coverage because it is important for anyone to know.”
