TV

Candidates go, ads remain as fight for Texas heats up

By Diane Holloway
AMERICAN-STATESMAN TELEVISION WRITER
Tuesday, February 26, 2008

If you don't know that Barack Obama's mother worried more about paying her bills when she was dying of cancer than seeking treatment or that Hillary Clinton has spent her whole life "trying to help somebody every day," then you haven't been watching TV lately.

The two candidates vying for the Democratic presidential nomination, who debated in Austin on Thursday, have been all over the Central Texas airwaves in the past week. The Austin debate on CNN, by the way, was the most-watched TV program that night, drawing 124,000 households locally — that is twice the number of homes tuned to "American Idol." (Nationally, it was the second most-watched debate in cable-news history, with 7.6 million viewers tuning in.)

The candidates' advertising blitz is only going to intensify as the March 4 Texas primaries approach. We are accustomed to seeing ads for local and state elections, but we haven't had so many presidential primary ads here in decades.

"All of a sudden, Texas is part of the country," said documentary filmmaker and University of Texas professor Paul Stekler. "We have two candidates neck-and-neck who are raising boatloads of money."

And they're spending it in 16 media markets around Texas, including heavily Democratic Austin. (Because the Republican side is not as hotly contested or flush with money, we're unlikely to see ads for front-runner John McCain, Mike Huckabee or Ron Paul.)

Clinton and Obama, on the other hand, are locked in a fierce contest, and this week, they're unloading 30-second spots all over Texas. In the early going, the ads have been personal, emotional and biographical.

Clinton's ads, shot in soft focus with soothing music, show the senator empathizing with everyday folks. Obama's ads feature the candidate delivering his message of hope and change to thunderous crowds.

Both camps have ads specific to Texas cities. Houston, San Antonio and the Rio Grande Valley, for example, have Spanish language ads geared toward Latino voters.

Leading into the Wisconsin primary, the tone of advertising that aired there shifted from overwhelmingly positive to slightly negative. Clinton accused Obama of dodging a debate; Obama responded that Clinton's accusation was evidence of "the same old Washington politics." Neither has come close to the infamous "mushroom cloud" ad run only once by Lyndon Johnson in his 1964 showdown with Barry Goldwater (implying that Goldwater would lead us to nuclear war). But the punches are getting stronger.

"Comparative advertising is used for selling products, too, and you have the same dilemma," said Isabella Cunningham, chairwoman of the University of Texas Department of Advertising. "How hard are you going to be on your competitor? Negative ads work in selected situations, if they're not too strong. Here we have two candidates with similar positions, so they would have to go negative on personality or background, and that's dangerous."

Attack ads can provoke a backlash, but they can work. In the April Journal of Consumer Research, a survey of registered voters ages 18 to 23 found that negative ads provoke more "voter migration" than positive ads. Using ads from the 2004 presidential elections, researchers from Notre Dame and the University of Texas at Dallas found that 14 percent of young voters moved toward the candidate doing the attacking, while positive ads had no such effect.

"There are two basic ways to win the TV ad war," said Mark Nathan, president of Austin Strategies, a political consulting firm. "One is to build up your positives, and the other is to build up your opponent's negatives. Put simply, as a candidate, you want the voters to have a more positive opinion of you than your opponent on election day."

So, the theory goes, Clinton's charges that Obama is all talk and no action could swing undecided and not-firmly-committed voters toward her. And Obama's charges that Clinton will "say anything and do anything to get elected" could have the same effect for him.

"For the most part, the campaigns know who their supporters are, and the real trick is trying to win folks who are still sitting on the fence," Nathan said. "Most of what we're seeing on TV now are simple, high-level messages about big issues — health care, jobs, the war. Obviously they are also trying hard to accomplish a very basic objective, which is to make voters like the candidates personally."

In this TiVo age, who is watching these 30-second sales pitches? Despite the splintering of the TV audience and the advent of digital recorders, experts say people are definitely checking out the candidates, either on TV or online. The campaigns don't provide ratings for their ads, but they wouldn't spend millions to beam video to an empty room.

"TV ads are the most effective tool that modern presidential campaigns have," Nathan said. "It's certainly where they spend the vast majority of their money. The process of creating political TV ads relies heavily on polling campaign messages and testing ads with targeted audiences. There's not much left to chance because the campaigns know that in many cases the TV ad might be a voter's only source of information about a candidate."