Political TV Advertising - Another Perspective

That moaning sound you hear is the collective groan of TV viewers who realize that the race for the November, 2008 election has already started. Negative TV ads work and we will see more than ever before.

But there is another group doing some groaning, and for a bit more important reason. Let me explain. To the average viewer, TV commercials may be entertaining, informative, irritating, or (too often) just plain boring.

But remember, apart from PBS, (TV's beggars), our entire TV industry is supported by advertising. All those highly paid actors, the famous news anchors, the wonderful coverage of sports and news events, and much more, are paid with advertising dollars. That gives you an idea of how important TV advertising is to some people.

Many, many businesses cannot survive without their TV advertising campaigns. And, even though a business may survive, individual salesman and other employees with incomes tied to production, may not.

To a viewer, it seems there is a never ending stream of TV commercials. Actually there is an end... a station can schedule only so many commercials, then they are out of time. There is a finite number of commercials which can be scheduled. When they have all been purchased, it is no longer possible to buy TV advertising. Never mind that your very livlihood depends on it.

So, when millions upon millions of dollars in political advertising is thrown into the mix, it puts a serious dent in the inventory of commercial TV time available, forcing many commercial advertisers out. The public hears about the rates charged advertisers for very special programs, like the Super Bowl, and think all TV advertising is very expensive. Not so. We have clients in upstate New York for whom we regularly buy TV commercials for under $40 each. Imagine what happened to the availability of commercial time when Hillary dumped $30 million into her 2006 Senate re-election campaign in New York. Yep, our clients could not buy TV advertising. It hurt them, hurt their salesmen and other workers, and it hurt us.

I am opposed to the idea of campaign finance limits, because that curtails free speech. If you want to spend all of your money promoting a political candidate, you should have the right to do that. I would like to see a law that says a TV station can sell only a certain per cent of their commercial time to political candidates (at whatever rate the political supporters are willing to pay). The rest must be reserved for commercial advertisers, the bread and butter of our economy. Get your political message across if you will. But please do not stop us from making a living.