and now it's about smart media buying

More Wednesday coverage of what New Hampshire Tuesday means: Ad Age looks at the shift coming in the campaign from on-the-ground flesh pressing organizations to a necessarily more media-driven campaign. After all, there's no way in hell the candidates will be able to shake hands with every single likely voter in all of the Super Duper Tuesday states.

"They'll be looking at tactical media strikes in select markets vs. a national effort," [Democratic Media Consultant Steve McMahon] said, predicting that national cable and some network TV news and public-affairs programming could be the beneficiary of any national buys.

It's even more interesting for the Republicans than the Democrats, according to Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute, especially if there's no clear front-runner.

"Feb. 5 is potentially going to be a problem for most of the Republican candidates," he said. "Unless Romney wants to take all his [personal wealth], competing in all 20 states is going to be prohibitively expensive. They don't have $40 million to $50 million in the bank, so what you are going to see is a very different process and a different kind of ad strategy where they are going to do national cable and look for other places to target."

Comments

[manresaclara]

There was an NPR interview back in December where they interviewed a candidate with a smaller budget (name escapes me, maybe it was Romney?) and the interviewer kept asking, how are you going to run on such a small budget?

In a way, it's usually those who have at least some money to support their campaigns that are able to run even though democractic ideals suggest anyone can run for president if they fit the requirements set forth in the Constitution.

It will be interesting to see how candidates approach the budget issue and publicity spending.