Obama aired 2.5 times more ads than Romney. | REUTERS Study: 3 million political ads in 2012

TV viewers were bombarded with more than 3 million ads related to the presidential and congressional elections in 2012, the Wesleyan Media Project reported Thursday.

The ads on broadcast and national cable television between Jan. 1, 2012, and Election Day cost an estimated $1.92 billion.


“We knew it was going to be a record-breaking year,” said Erika Franklin Fowler, one of the authors of the study. “It was just a question of how record breaking it would be.”

The total amount represents a 33 percent increase in the number of ads and 81 percent increase in cost compared to the 2008 election.

The study also found that although both President Barack Obama and Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney aired most of their ads during local news programming, the Obama campaign also bought significantly more air time on talk and reality shows and niche cable networks than the Romney campaign.

“That’s an evidence of micro-targeting in the strategy… and an evidence of difference in tactics,” Fowler said.

The Obama campaign continued to make efficient ad buys throughout the 2012 election. In all, Obama aired 2.5 times more ads than Romney, who paid more for fewer spots. Both campaigns spent heavily on advertising in Nevada and Colorado with Las Vegas and Denver media markets seeing the most presidential political advertising.

The presidential election set another record in 2012 for airing the most number of negative ads. About 64 percent of ads aired were purely negative — up from the 51 percent in 2008.

The amount of money spent on political advertising during the Republican presidential primary also skyrocketed in the 2012 election. Outside groups aired 60 percent of the total ads during the primary. In 2000, 2004 and 2008, less than 15 percent of all ads were aired by outside groups.

Wesleyan’s findings were published in The Forum: A Journal of Applied Research on Contemporary Politics.

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