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Obama and Romney Have Aired One Million TV Ads in Five Months

Yeah, according to the latest study from the Wesleyan Media Project, one million political ads have now aired across the United States in this election cycle alone.

Election watchers are furiously making their final tallies, and it looks like the two campaigns will have burned through a record-obliterating $6 billion by the middle of next week. And you already know where the bulk of that cash went: Ad buys. An unholy, also-record-obliterating spree of ad buys.

One million, to be exact. Yeah, according to the latest study from the Wesleyan Media Project, one million political ads have now aired across the United States in this election cycle alone. Obama has aired more of his own, Romney’s gotten more support from his supportive Super PACs.

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From the analysis: “the number of ads aired in the presidential general election passed the one million mark last week. As of October 29, the two candidates, their party committees, and supporting interest groups had sponsored 1,015,615 ads since June 1, a 39.1% increase over 2008 (730,041) and a 41% increase over 2004 (720,064).”

A million ads in five months. That’s a brain-exploding number, especially since there are only so many swing states.

Brain-numbing, at least: Money may be flooding into campaigns like never before, and they may be utilizing high-tech donation-soliciting operations and sophisticated media market analysis. But little has changed the fundamental nature of the game—big, dumb political ads. Attack ads. Candidate-aggrandizing ads. Lie-filled ads. Ads that star a stoically independent-minded everyman like you or me solemnly declaring his support for one guy, not the other guy. Ads that make you dumbly shake your head and roll your eyes. It’s a great morass of crap—check out our rundown of the terrible, Super PAC-fueled politico-ad complex to wade through more of it.

The apparatus that collects the cash that allows for the production of such ads may have grown exponentially advanced, but the ads themselves have most certainly not. Same bad ads, just more of them. It’s no doubt yielded the same irritation and aggravation amongst voters as in years past, just to a heightened degree. This flurry of ad crap has reduced the nation to this:

The campaign managers of the future are probably going to have to find more innovative ways to make use of that glut of cash, so as long as the Super PAC tap stays turned on. Of course, we’ll have to wade through the election’s aftermath to get a sense for how much that cash really influenced the results. Until then, brace yourself against the flood. The boring-ass, annoying flood.