Ads Still Slow: Voters Don't Read?

By: Jennifer Saba The race to garner national political ads is so far going neither to the steady nor the swift, but there's still time left before Nov. 2. "Basically, the newspapers are out knocking on doors now," Jack Brady, director of marketing and advertising for the Newspaper Association of America, said in mid-September. "As we get closer to Election Day and things start to get tighter, that's where we are going to find more success."

E&P spoke to several newspapers, paying particular attention to swing states, and found that most are having some success on the local level. Getting some of the millions of Bush-Kerry race dollars, however, is proving more difficult.

Teresa Griffin, director of media marketing for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in swing state Missouri, had not seen much activity as of mid-September even though the paper has gone out with very aggressive rate structures. She confirmed that both the Bush and Kerry camps ran "a little bit online," yet there's little real traction in print. "Kerry's position is that he doesn't use print," she says, but she's still hoping for more political ads.

Cleveland's Plain Dealer, the largest paper in what many consider the swing state, isn't exactly swimming in ads from the presidential candidates. Laurie Myers, a Plain Dealer sales executive, has so far received several phone calls from advocacy groups about pricing. She doesn't expect to see anything until later in October.

Over at the Dayton (Ohio) Daily News, Vice President of Advertising Mark Stange reports that most activity has taken place on its Web site and "more from the Republicans than from the Democrats, by far."

In Florida, the Orlando Sentinel is reaping most of its political dollars from local and regional races. "We are running total revenue-wise about what we have expected but not much on the state or national advertising side, either in print or online," says Ashley Allen, vice president of corporate communications.