On Sunday, Variety posted an article about the amount of eyeballs that saw the first Swift Boat Veterans advertisement - and how they far outnumbered the viewers that exist within the seven markets they were paid for to run in. The article cites a report from the Nielsen Monitor-Plus and the University of Wisconsin Advertising Project, which found that while the ads ran only 739 times, as opposed to the 501,259 airings of ads by Bush, Kerry, or their supporters, it got much, much more play than what was paid for.
So let’s digest this for a second - have you discussed ANY political advertisement this year with your colleagues at work….other than the Swift Boat ad? Now - do you live in Charleston, Dayton, Green Bay, LaCrosse, Toledo, Wassau, and Youngstown or receive television programming from those cities? Well, 6.5 million people live there, but there are almost 280 million more people in the U.S. that don’t live there - and significantly more than 6.5 million of those remaining Americans surely saw the advertisement, from FOX News to MSNBC to their network news. So figure they at least doubled their viewership, all because what they had to say was newsworthy.
Check out the full report here.
[Props to Matt Sheffield for the tip]
