Romney Returns To The Air

Ex-MA Gov. Mitt Romney's presidential campaign, which took down its TV ads early last week to save money before Labor Day, will be back on the air on network affiliate stations by Thursday.

According to a rival campaign media buyer, Romney's campaign placed orders for approximately 200 to 350 gross ratings points worth of ads in Iowa markets, 250 gross ratings points on WMUR in New Hampshire and 150 GRPS in other New Hampshire markets.

GRPs are calculated by multiplying a spot's reach by the number of times it airs. If a spot airs on televison programs that reach 30 percent of Des Moines viewers five times, the campaign would have purchased about 150 GRPS. Generally, 1000 GRPS constitutes market saturation.

Comments

Is that 30% of television viewers or 30% of the total population?

Posted by Anonymous | August 28, 2007 7:56 PM

All these ads and millions will not erase all those classic Romney flip-flops. Once a flip-flopper will always be a flip-flopper.

When is Mitt going to include his biggest supporter Larry Craig in his ads? Remember how family-values Craig approved Mitt's family-values? There is a lot in common between Craig and Romney.

Lets have "Romney - Craig 2008" ticket that represents family-values.

Posted by pk | August 29, 2007 12:27 PM

As a buyer, I wouldn't call 1000 points saturation.

Theoretically, 1000 points means everyone in the market has seen an ad 10 times, but what it REALLY means is that heavy viewers-- either those who have the TV on all the time, or those who watch the same three shows every night which campaigns happen to buy-- see the ad twenty times or more, and others don't see it once.

So "market saturation" is a subjective call. And I would make a judgement only after I knew who the ad is MEANT to reach, and how powerful the ad itself is, before I'd be able to define "saturation."

1 rating point = 1% of the market's (the whole area the station reaches) potential audience. Generally, ratings are higher in the evening because more people are home watching TV.

But ratings are only one measure of popularity. "Share" is another-- CBS's Morning Show has extraordinarily low ratings but in some markets has decent share, usually due to a strong local news operation of the local CBS affiliate. NBC's Today show leads in the national ratings slightly, but ABC's Good Morning America wins the share in many markets, just like Pepsi beats Coke in some places.

And, of course, these ratings measure PEOPLE, not VOTERS (let alone "likely" voters).

Posted by jmh | August 29, 2007 1:20 PM