I was fascinated by lowkell's breakdown of who sees a broadcast ad on metro DC television in yesterday's progressive state blog roundup.
The problem of spending big bucks to buy broadcast time in a market that reaches many more voters than you're aiming for isn't limited to Northern Virginia, though. Other big, multi-district/multi-state markets like Philadelphia, Chicago, Kansas City have the same feature: you can reach the people you're trying to persuade, but you're paying to annoy a lot of others who can't vote for your candidate. Even my humble New Orleans reflects the dilemma. Mississippi Saints fans are going to have to suffer through another month of Koch lies about Mary Landrieu if they want to watch WWL or FOX 8.
There are at least partial solutions. Shifting ad money to cable and satellite enables finer geographic targeting and internet advertising can shrink the ground zero to a single person. (The value of online micro-targeting is, imo, yet to be proven. This was to be the Year of the Data Men and our team didn't do too well. And, from the other end, seeing the same anti-Landrieu Koch ad before every YouTube video didn't make me vote against her).
Still, I wonder if party committees are making a mistake in not exploiting the media market splashover with generic party ID advertising.
I know this is something of a heresy in political media theory, that one doesn't advertise for or against a generic party brand. "People don't vote for parties, people vote for candidates." But is that really true?
In the election just past, our opponents consistently de-localized the perception of our candidates. Udall wasn't Colorado, he was "Washington." Hagan wasn't North Carolina, she was "Washington."
And all of them were "Obama."
Meanwhile, no 'Pub calls herself a 'Pub. She is "conservative," a label that, with the 'Pubs blowing up defecits, leaping into pointless wars and trashing long-established programs and protocols, has become linguistically null.
'Pubs are not afraid to genericize. We were.
We were afraid to be identified with the president. We were afraid to champion the programs our party has built for the American public. We were hundreds of individuals begging for attaboys. And not getting them.
Republicans, despite their recent gains, represent a bad brand, the least-loved and least-trusted in the political marketplace. Why is it a point of faith that one doesn't run against that brand? Why, in short, do the national committees not use the feature of large, multi-state broadcast markets to define our opponents, to wed them to their awful brand?
There is a reason 'Pub candidates don't self-ID with the name of their own party: people hate their party. There is an opportunity for ours in that.