Sunday, October 28, 2012

Billionaire's independent campaign for Mitt Romney includes magazine in weeklies and dailies in 4 states

So much money has gone into the presidential election for broadcast advertising that at least one outside group is trying a special section in weekly and daily newspapers to persuade voters in the swing states of Wisconsin, Ohio, Iowa, Virginia and Florida.

"In a retro move for a new media age, one conservative super PAC is spending more than $1 million in Wisconsin and four other battlegrounds on a breezy, pro-Romney, 12-page color 'magazine' . . . in some weekly papers on Thursday and daily papers on Sunday," reports Craig Gilbert of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

"We're trying to get outside the clutter box," Will Feltus, ad man for TD Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts, who is funding the $10 million Ending Spending Action Fund campaign, told Gilbert, who writes: "The group's rationale is twofold: The airwaves are almost hopelessly saturated with TV spots, and newspaper readers are highly cost-effective targets for political communications because of their propensity to vote."

"The best predictor of whether somebody is going to vote or not is whether or not they read the newspaper," said Feltus, "who did media buying and targeting for the 2004 George W. Bush re-election effort," Gilbert reports.

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