Cable TV Ads Provide Campaign Power

Pockets of cable television viewers taking in a cooking demonstration or catching up with CNN’s overseas news last spring found themselves suddenly gazing at the image of a police officer endorsing Inglewood-based state Senate hopeful Ed Vincent.

For years, longtime officeholder Vincent built his campaigns around a legislative candidate’s traditional weapon of choice: carefully targeted mailings. Then, locked in a tough battle for an open state Senate seat in the March primary, the Democratic assemblyman added another gambit.

Vincent’s consultant, Rick Taylor, made a 30-second television commercial and bought hundreds of time slots on the several small cable TV systems dotting the 25th Senate District, which runs from Inglewood and Hawthorne to Lynwood, part of Compton and a corner of Long Beach.

The assemblyman resoundingly won the primary--and joined the rapidly swelling ranks of candidates and issues campaigns enthusiastically turning to cable for a winning edge. They see it as an affordable, more efficient alternative to broadcast stations, especially in some of the largest, most expensive media markets--New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area.

Thanks to cable, television advertising is no longer reserved for the extremely well-heeled candidate or top-of-the-ticket contests.

To be sure, cable has its shortcomings, including limited numbers of subscribers and splintered audiences. Still, candidates for congressional, legislative and local offices are finding it worthwhile. It costs a fraction of the price of broadcast time and doesn’t waste campaign dollars on voters outside a candidate’s district.

“It used to be that you usually saw TV ads only in statewide and national elections, but, because of a real proliferation in cable television outlets, the ads are now filtering down to legislative and even local races,” said Darrell West, director of the Taubman Center for Public Policy at Brown University.

In the big-spending, high-stakes 27th Congressional District race, where Democrats have made GOP Rep. James E. Rogan of Glendale a top target in their push to gain control of the House of Representatives, both sides are using cable ads extensively.

Rogan so far has been on the air more than his Democratic challenger, state Sen. Adam Schiff of Burbank. Rogan blanketed the district’s cable systems during the primary and launched his general election commercials in May, forcing the Schiff campaign to begin its own ads two weeks later--much sooner than it had intended.

Watchdog Groups

Shortly before the March 7 primary, Parke Skelton, Schiff’s consultant, used cable to target Armenian voters--an important bloc in Glendale--by purchasing 570 spots on an Armenian-language cable station. Among other things, the commercial talked about how Schiff secured state funding for a documentary film on the Armenian Genocide by the Turkish government and featured photos of Schiff with prominent Armenian leaders.

When translated from English, the 30-second spot unexpectedly grew to 43 seconds, but that didn’t faze Skelton because the cost for the whole buy still came to only $6,000.

“I was happy to write the check,” Skelton said of what he viewed as the best way to reach those voters.

Cable’s affordability also appeals to government watchdog groups concerned about the high price of political campaigns.

“Anything that can reduce the cost of campaigns helps the political process,” said Robert M. Stern, president of the Los Angeles-based Center for Governmental Studies, a nonprofit, bipartisan organization.

“Cable has not yet reached its full potential, but it is getting there. It is enabling legislative and congressional candidates to reach voters in a cost-effective way,” Stern said.

The Vincent commercial is a case in point.

Taylor said he paid about $20,000 for 1,736 airings of the ad--which featured images of a police officer, a firefighter, a teacher and three prominent California Democrats who endorsed Vincent--over a 10-day period. To run the spot on one of Los Angeles’ broadcast stations, Taylor estimated, would have cost $12,000 to $30,000 per showing for a prime-time network program and $2,000 to $5,000 for a slot on a newscast.

Although he does not foresee cable ads replacing direct mail as the most important tool in local contests, Taylor said he uses them in at least half his campaigns now to “reinforce the message” in the mailers.

“I can’t imagine legitimate campaigns in the next few years not using cable TV--it’s starting to become a major player,” said Taylor, who credits the medium for contributing to Vincent’s stunning 70% to 30% triumph over another assemblyman in a district where winning the Democratic primary is tantamount to victory in the fall.

He cited cable’s growing audiences, specialized programming appealing to various groups and the fact that some of its programming--news, public affairs, history and arts channels--appeals to dedicated voters.

Most political consultants share Taylor’s view. But not all are as enthusiastic about a medium that, while growing, reaches on average only 60% to 70% of American households with television sets. (However, the numbers tend to be higher in the suburbs, site of most of the hard-fought battles between the two major parties.)

And the splintered nature of cable’s audiences means a campaign needs to buy lots of spots.

“Yes, we are using it more often, but we certainly don’t view it as the primary message-carrier,” said Ray McNally, a Sacramento-based Republican consultant who has overseen many statewide, legislative and issues campaigns.

“It’s really cheap, but nobody knows whether you are reaching anyone,” McNally said.

In part, that is because data on ratings and viewer demographics for cable generally are not as thorough as for broadcast stations.

That doesn’t stop some of the nation’s top media consultants from making the same sort of sophisticated commercials for cable that they do for broadcast.

And for campaigns that cannot afford a media firm, some cable systems offer their own production services for a professional touch.

Valerie Burchfield, who sells advertising time on Time Warner Communications cable systems in Orange County and in some of Los Angeles County’s South Bay communities, said candidates can choose among 30 different networks, from CNN and Lifetime to the History Channel and ESPN.

“We’ve seen a huge growth in political advertising,” Burchfield said. “Ten years ago [campaigns] wouldn’t even talk to us. Now we sometimes have to turn it away.”

School Board Campaigns

Bill Carrick, a prominent media consultant whose firm, Morris, Carrick and Guma, is based in New York and Los Angeles, has used cable ads to augment broadcast commercials in such campaigns as Mayor Richard Riordan’s cash-rich 1997 reelection campaign. But he found cable alone to be highly effective in other campaigns he advised, including some of last year’s Los Angeles school board races and the successful drive to pass a measure overhauling Los Angeles’ City Charter.

It takes a certain amount of political sophistication to use cable wisely, however, and Jean Brooks, of Carat USA, an international media buying firm, advises her clients to look at other options as well.

“There are a lot of factors that come into play, a lot of variations in circumstances,” Brooks said. “It can end up being expensive, if you need to cover a wider area or want the best times on the most popular [cable] networks.”

Those few Los Angeles-area congressional or legislative candidates who can afford it still prefer broadcast.

Jane Harman used broadcast commercials when she was first elected in 1992 from the South Bay’s 36th Congressional District.

State Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Los Angeles) used broadcast ads during his first run for state office in 1982, when he won a Westside Assembly district seat in a contest that set a spending record for a California legislative race. Since he was married then to actress Jane Fonda, and had backing from some wealthy Westside liberals, money was not an issue.

Ads During Wrestling Matches

But when he ran for Los Angeles mayor in 1977 against incumbent Riordan, Hayden turned to cable. He ran a witty, 30-minute “documentary of snippets from the campaign trail. It ran eight times on a small Westside station at $600 a pop.

Although most campaigns don’t begin running television ads until a few weeks before election day, cable commercials already are on the air in some of this year’s hottest campaigns.

The California Democratic Party and the AFL-CIO have each run separate ads attacking Rep. Steven T. Kuykendall’s (R-Torrance) recent vote on a prescription drug bill. One of them aired in the middle of a World Wrestling Federation match--seemingly an odd spot for an ad aimed at senior citizens.

A variation of the AFL-CIO prescription drug bill, featuring Rogan as its target, ran recently in the superheated 27th Congressional District race recently.

The California Democratic Party also ran a cable ad last month in the district, which includes Burbank, Glendale and Pasadena, knocking Rogan’s record on education issues. Last week, Rogan responded with a commercial portraying himself as a champion of school reform and slamming “national teachers unions.”

Their cable-ad battle began when Rogan in May launched an attack on Schiff, implying the state senator was in cahoots with trial lawyers to drive up health care costs. The Schiff campaign went on the air within two weeks, with a mostly positive ad featuring a constituent, Irene McDermott, whose HMO had refused to pay for her husband’s chemotherapy treatments. She told how Schiff had helped, and ended by pointing out that Rogan had voted against a major patients-rights bill in the House.

In a race where the combined spending is widely expected to exceed the $8 million record cost for a House contest, Schiff’s campaign consultant Skelton estimates he has spent $160,000 on cable ads since the primary.

Rogan campaign manager Jason Roe said Rogan spent about a quarter of a million dollars on cable during the primary and, counting the ads that began last week, put the tab at $380,000 to date in the general.

But that could be just the beginning. A recent Rogan fund-raising letter outlined his goal of running cable TV ads continuously between now and election day on Nov. 7.