Report: GOP Ad Buyers Favor Crime Dramas, While Dems Go For Comedies

by Hillary Busis | 1:49 pm, November 1st, 2010

» 4 comments

According to Ashley Parker of the New York Times, Dancing with the Stars attracts ads from Republicans and Democrats in equal measure. As Parker writes, though, the “bipartisan consensus on America’s TV habits apparently ends there.”

In a year when political spending on TV advertising will hit an all-time high of $3 billion, all television programs are not created equal. Each major party targets different sets of voters by choosing to run ads for their candidates during different types of shows.

Will Feltus, senior VP of a Republican political media buying organization, explains that conservatives are more likely to buy ads during “certain types of crime dramas” that draw right-skewing audiences. “Republicans tend to like shows where there are good guys and bad guys, and where the good guy prevails. On ‘NCIS,’ the good guys just so happen to work for the Navy,” Feltus says.

Republicans also advertise much more heavily during sports programming, as Parker writes:

Republicans bought nearly three times as many ads as Democrats on “Saturday Night College Football,” more than twice as many on “Sunday Night NFL Football” and Nascar racing, and almost twice as many during Major League Baseball games.

According to demographic data from the Nielsen Company, the sports shows most favored by Republican buyers — “Saturday Night College Football,” “NBC Sunday Night Football,” “NFL Sunday Kickoff,” Nascar racing and Major League Baseball — have an audience that is nearly two-thirds or higher male.

“College sports is probably the cleanest buy for Republicans, or the buy where they’re getting the biggest advantage,” said Ken Goldstein, the research director for the Midwest Media Research Foundation. “Republicans think their base is more likely to be watching sports, and if they’re looking for younger males, or younger white males, it’s college football.”

Democrats, for their part, target talk-show watchers and comedy lovers with their ads—audiences that tend to include more women:

Evan Tracey, the president of the Campaign Media Analysis Group, said that talk programs were “the opposite of sports.”

“Women and especially single women are a very reliable voting bloc for Democrats,” he said. “That’s why you see a lot of Democrats being aimed at in those programs. That’s an important turnout audience for them.”

Despite all this, though, prime time ad purchases still only make up 10 to 20 percent of all political spending. The majority of ads still run on news shows, presumably because those viewers are the ones most likely to vote. Read Parker’s article in full at NYTimes.com.

[h/t Daily Intel]

2010 midterm elections, 2010 midterms, campaign ad, campaign ads, Dancing With The Stars, Midterms 2010

Arkansas Steve

** Copied from a comment by felixw **

Nineteen Lessons the Democrats Need to Learn from the Election Defeat of 2010

1. Don’t pass bills without reading them.

2. When a political party takes its cues from Comedy Central, it is unlikely to win the next election.

3. You don’t create prosperity by spending money you don’t have. That’s how you create poverty.

4. Don’t hold a town hall meeting if you don’t want to hear what voters have to say.

5. Businesses, not government, are the source of productive jobs.

6. You don’t fix industries by giving them 3,000 pages of new regulations.

7. You can’t create jobs while punishing the people who do the hiring.

8. Borrowing another $100 billion every month from the Chinese is not a solution to any problem.

9. Elections are won by attention to the issues, not by character attacks, smears and jokes.

10. Don’t promise the voters transparency if you plan to govern via backroom deals.

11. People won’t hire and expand their businesses if they don’t know what their tax rates will be next year.

12. When you constantly accuse people who disagree with you of racism, you destroy your own credibility, not theirs.

13. Don’t brag about how many jobs you’ve created when everyone can see that the unemployment rate is rising.

14. When voters ask for government accountability and fiscal responsibility, politicians should not respond with ridicule—unless they want to be thrown out of office in the next election.

15. If you turn the home mortgage into a welfare entitlement, don’t be surprised when the loans aren’t repaid.

16. When you spend your energy trying to silence your political opponents, it’s a sign that you’ve already lost the argument.

17. Don’t tell us “we have to pass the healthcare bill to find out what’s in it.”

18. People figured out long ago that free stuff from the government isn’t really free. Don’t insult their intelligence.

19. It’s the economy, stupid.
http://www.facebook.com/people/Shawn-Soya/1088592828 Shawn Soya

Arkansas Steve said:
** Copied from a comment by felixw **
.

Pretty sad that you’ve resorted to copying stuff from felix.
Latin2

“: GOP Ad Buyers Favor Crime Dramas, While Dems Go For Comedies”

That is because Liberals are delusional and live in a fantasy world…so of course you target comedies, after all the top trusted Liberal for Democrats IS Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert.
NORBIT

That’s because GOP viewers like to think, and Democrats don’t.