Saturday, September 24, 2016

Trump - $140 million dollar ad buy...

Sixty million will go to local advertising in Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Maine, New Mexico and Wisconsin. Forty million will go towards national advertising. The remaining forty million will go towards digital advertising.



There has been a lot of criticism regarding Trumps lack of advertising and reliance on twitter, big events, and free media. He allowed Hillary to run over forty thousand television ads before running one himself. But in spite of all that, Hillary couldn't really take full advantage of her advertising and we find ourselves in a traditionally close election at this point. It will appear (once again) to boil down to a handful of states.

Not sure the ad buy compares to what Hillary is spending down the stretch. But it has to be (at the very least) much closer than forty thousand to none. Either way, one might expect that Trumps advertising might be more impactful considering these are going to be new to many people. People tend to tune out political ads (or any ads) once they have seen them so many times.

So the question remains... how does Clinton run forty thousand ads and "not" be ahead by double digits?

Well it reminds me of the story about a pet food company who was bringing out a new dog food. They hired the best advertising firm, spend a record amount of money on the advertising drive, saturating the market with their ingenious ad campaign. After a fairly good start, the sales started to level off to very disappointing levels. So they called a meeting with the advertising firm to find out what went wrong. The pet food company made their case that the firm was derelict and demanded an explanation for why their product was not selling considering the money poured into everything.

The advertising firm said that they had done tons of market research, got very consistent feedback, and certainly had a good answer for the pet food company. It turned out that dogs simply didn't like the food so people quit buying it.

Sometimes, it's more about the product than the pitch. We'll see if the Donald has better luck making his case than Hillary did.

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