I’ll be placing ads on the three Duluth televison networks today. I won’t spend a lot of money and the prices have shot up since I waited until the heavy political hitters ratcheted up their advertising. The stations can and will charge more during these last two weeks. They offer several pricing tiers and if you buy the cheepest ads they can be bumped from the program you ordered by more expensive ads. The only way to guarantee you get the ad placement you want is to pay top dollar for “fixed rate” ads.
One single guaranteed thirty-second spot on WDIO’s 10 O’clock news costs $1,800 dollars. That’s almost as much as I’m willing to spend in total. Its being reported that all the major Minnesota candidates together will spend over a million and a half bucks on TV in the last two weeks of the campaign. The ad I’ll be putting on will barely be noticed. I’m putting it on the early morning news and on some daytime programs, where I hope viewers will have the time to go to their computers to log onto my campaign website which the ad prominantly highlights.
In anticipation of a rush to my website I tinkered with its opening page again.
I put back my cheery video welcome. A week ago I had replaced it with my dour TV commercial. I decided that the ad wasn’t very welcoming and, unlike my welcome video, didn’t ask visitors to “push the button.” The “button” link gives visitors the chance to send my website via email to their friends. If enough people did this it would be better than having them see the TV commerical because they could spend much more than a mere thirty seconds looking at my positions.
A couple days ago the Library of Congress sent me an email telling me that my website was one they had selected to archive permanantly as a representative sample of 2006 campaign websites. Voters may not be visiting in great numbers but future scholars might.
