Mitt Romney spent a great deal of money on television ads this cycle.
All the candidates might as well quit now.
If it were not for an Old Media obsession with ad buys which pretend that if you are not “on the air” (what a charming old phrase!) that you are “out” or “not serious,” without buying commercials there would be almost no good reason to run them at all.
The chattering class in the media still have clout, but on their shows. People do listen to content, just not to ads!
Ads work less and less well in this culture and this year marked a tipping point to uselessness. Right now the chatterers have not caught up to the fact, and they have good financial reason not to point out that ads, though not dead yet, are on the cart being hauled to the cemetery.
The talkers still think you must run ads, so to that extent you must run some, so the talkers can take you seriously. It is their opinion you are buying, and hopefully that of the folk downloading their pod-cast, but the ad itself is persuading few.
Most of us could have told the Romney folk that television ads are a waste of money . . . at least in the amounts “old school” campaigns used to spend.
More and more people are tuning out ads if they can and they easily can. I have not watched a single paid commercial in months and this is not because I am some “new media” guy hanging out in cutting edge California.
(My children howl with laughter at the very thought that a guy who believes “The Passion of Joan of Arc” is cool could ever be cutting edge. My notion of “wow!” is curling up with the Phaedo while drinking a latte in my Star Trek the Original Series mug. I am so uncool that my interest personally caused the cancellation of Angel.)
So it is not just the “cool kids” who are tuning out. The rest of us are avoiding ads like an Apple user avoids the blue screen of death.
My father at seventy watches no ads or nearly no ads in his West Virginia home. My Dad is smart and knows his way around the culture, but he is pretty intentionally not cutting edge.
He does not watch ads, especially the depressing and stupid ones “aimed” at his demographic group. Adverts are boring and a waste of time. If you need to go potty or get popcorn, then the pause button is much less irritating than endless commercials for Bryman (now Everest) College.
Why would either household subject themselves to annoyance?
Most of our family video comes through the Internet, our extensive film collection, or through a digital video recorder. We don’t like much of what Hollywood produces now, but for our family that is less important when last night our video time could be spent visiting the Triple R with Spin and Marty. If my wife and older children want to watch Tarkovsky’s Solaris, then we can as well.
We are our own network and the Reynolds’ network doesn’t do adverts.
There are millions of families who never watch live commercial television. My suspicion is that if you want to reach pro-family voters, the last place to advertise (outside of the Super Bowl or some sports) is live commercial television.
Want to reach young voters?
I don’t know any students who watch ads except for sporting events like the Super Bowl.
A good “commercial” is one like Mike Huckabee’s ad featuring Chuck Norris that is entertaining or one that is pure information. What is your view on abortion? Make a “you-tube” telling us (camera, you, up-load) and we will watch it.
Television has been in clever denial about their ads for the last few years. Perhaps this campaign will wake advertisers up to the death, not the looming death but the present death, of most “big ad” buys.
There is a golden age coming for small sites with built-in audiences. Small ad buys (compared to the billions at an ABC or CBS) will look big to the small providers (like blogs as they continue to evolve or film projects like the fabulous New Renaissance Films). For media providers (see studios) who spend more money on catering that content, the golden age is over. For Josh Sikora, the boy-genius of new media, and Matt Jones, a person who will soon be famous for being smart, the great age of story telling has come.
They, the content creators, will be lords of the media earth. They will not make billions, but they can raise their families (when they come) on hundreds of thousands and millions.
The Dinosaurs had better enjoy their catered lunch today, because the salad days for them are over.
Get the book The New Media Frontier this fall edited by the all-capable Roger Overton, with a preface by Hugh Hewitt, in which two Scriptorium Daily writers (Sanders and Reynolds!) are part of team that does contain some cool people (Matt Anderson!) that opine about a future that is already here.
(No comments about the speed of book publishing please.)
This 2008 campaign, with its wasted television ads, has shown that the “new media” world is simply reality.