If you live in the DC market, you’ve read, heard or watched ads that portray phone companies as luddite-sweetheart-deal-makers or that depict cable operators as greedy-over-chargers. This kind of entertainment does not come free.
My friend Gary Arlen of Arlen Communications has done a little analysis to calculate how much the two industries have spent to flood the DC metro airwaves with ads related to the Telecom Act rewrite activity. Based on his analysis of the local TV ad market and broadcast monitoring services, supplemented by interviews with Washington advertising executives, Gary concluded that the campaigns have boosted local ad revenues by about $975,000 per week.
Here’s how it breaks down:
*U.S. Telecom Association: $1.5 million over six weeks (i.e. $250,000 per week)
*AT&T (for its “Choice” campaign): $600,000 per week
*TV4US (an “astroturf” campaign) $75,000 per week for 4 weeks (or until Congress acts on the legislation)
*NCTA: $1 million over the course of a year, but not broken out by local DC campaign…but let’s estimate ~ $50,000 per week during this Congressional period.
*Total saturation spending (not including print, bus shelter signs, airport signs, etc.): about $975,000.
Most of you outside of DC won’t have seen much of this advertising. Why? Well, you don’t get to vote on any legislation or brief those people who do get to vote.
Anyway, it’s nice to see the local economy get a lift from this battle.
Cynthia Brumfield at 3:57 PM|Comments(0)
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