Political Advertising In Iowa Continues To Grow

Mike Huckabee’s surging but cash-hungry bid to win the Iowa Republican Caucus likely will get a boost in coming weeks when he begins running television commercials in the state. He joins a growing list of candidates, including fellow Republicans Tom Tancredo and Ron Paul, who are taking to the airwaves for the first time with just six weeks left until the state’s first-in-the-nation caucuses.

Eric Woolson, Huckabee’s Iowa campaign manager, confirmed to the Iowa Independent that television ads would begin running soon, although he declined to discuss timing of the ads, how much would be spent, or on what stations they would run. The national director of sales at one Iowa TV station said he’s heard Huckabee will concentrate on buying cable television advertising.

The move is significant regardless of where the advertising runs because, until now, Huckabee has concentrated on direct-mail advertising and face-to-face meetings with voters in the state to build support. Several polls last week showed that Huckabee in second place in the state, trailing only Mitt Romney.

As recently as July, Huckabee registered at only one percent in many polls, but a survey of 600 Republican voters released Thursday by the American Research Group showed Romney with 26 percent of the vote, Huckabee with 24 percent, and Rudy Giuliani and Fred Thompson with 11 percent each. John McCain was at 10 percent, the only remaining candidate in double-digits in the state.

Monday is the first day of a federally mandated 45-day window that requires local television stations to give candidates preferential treatment by allowing them to buy advertising for any time they request, even if it means they have to bump a commercial advertiser. Candidates also are offered reduced rates during the 45 days leading up to the election, but most campaigns choose to pay full rates. That’s because a television station has the option of moving reduced rate political advertising if another campaign requests the same time slot and agrees to pay full rate.Under Federal Communication Commission guidelines, information about political advertising purchases is available for review by anybody who visits the station’s offices to review it. Advertising purchases in Iowa vary geographically depending on the number of Democrats and Republicans in particular viewing areas and how races are shaping up locally, according to internal campaign tracking polls.

The advertising buys at KCRG-TV in Cedar Rapids, a perennial ratings leader in eastern Iowa, provide a microcosm of sorts for what’s going on across the state and illustrate the huge amounts of money campaigns are spending on television commercials.

According to records at KCRG, Republican Mitt Romney is the station’s largest political advertiser this campaign season. Last week, his campaign ordered 55 spots at a cost of $32,500 at the station. Most of the spots will run during local newscasts. Rival Republicans Fred Thompson ordered 51 spots for the week at a cost of $19,500 and Ron Paul  booked 31 commercials to run over a two week period at a cost of $17,250. All the spots were 30 second long; costs for specific spots vary depending on the time of the day run. Those are the first spots that Paul has run on KCRG-TV, said Steve Lake, the station’s National Sales Director.

On the Democratic side, front-runners Barack Obama ran 49 spots at a cost of $20,000, Hillary Clinton ordered 45 spots at $19,500, John Edwards ordered 48 spots for $18,725 and Bill Richardson booked 20 spots for $17,400. Lake said that an order for Chris Dodd’s campaign was being revised. Dodd had originally booked 20 30-second spots at a cost of $13,400 but was converting the order to a still undetermined number of 60-second spots, spending about the same amount money. Dodd was the only candidate running the longer spots.

Lake said campaign staffers also frequently visit the station to keep tabs on advertising plans of their rivals. Federal law allows campaigns to order advertising with assurances that the commercials appear almost instantly. That allows campaigns to quickly react to trends in the political arena. But that doesn’t mean campaigns wait until the last minute to book time. Lake said several candidates have made orders for December advertising. The Clinton campaign, for instance, has already issued it’s order for the last week of December: 77 spots for $37,500.

Television viewers in Iowa who are weary of campaign advertising will get a bit of a break after the caucuses end. But a report last week by TNS Media Intelligence said that because Iowa will be a key battleground state in the general election, political advertising is expected to be a fixture on Iowa TV stations for much of next year.

Iowa is at the top of its list: “Best Positioned States for 2008 Political Ad Spending.” The study says Iowa is “Ground zero for the Presidential primary, likely general election battleground state as well as competitive House races in the state.”

Other states on the list include: New Hampshire, Florida, Ohio, Maine, Minnestoa, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Louisiana, Colorado and California.

The New York Times reported in its Sunday edition that candidates have spent about $20 million on television advertising at stations in the state since January 1, 2007. According to The Times, Obama and Romney have each spent $3.5 million for roughly 5,500 television spots on commercial television stations, followed by Richardson ($2 million for 4,200 spots), Clinton ($1.9 million for 3,193 spots), Edwards ($600,000 for 627 spots), and Thompson ($200,000 for 250 spots). The figures do not include advertising on cable television.