Election Fails to Yield Advertising Windfall For L.A. TV Stations

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Election Fails to Yield Advertising Windfall For L.A. TV Stations

By CLAUDIA PESCHIUTTA

Staff Reporter

A last-minute deluge of political advertising leading up to last week’s primary didn’t live up to the expectations of local media executives.

Fund-raising was slow because most people forgot that the primary had been moved to March from June, said Howard Sunkin, vice president of Cerrell Associates Inc., a local public relations and political consulting firm. If fund-raising is slow, campaigns have less money for advertising and have to delay the start of their spots.

Some of the spending came in last-minute attacks. The Yes on 42 campaign, which supported the transportation funding measure, didn’t see its opponents start spending on ads until a few days before the election, said spokesman Scott Macdonald. The campaign wound up spending $1.5 million on L.A. radio and TV spots.

Supporters of Proposition 40, the Clean Water Act, spent $2.6 million on TV ads in L.A. Opponents of Proposition 45 on legislative term limits spent about $200,000 on radio, TV and cable in L.A.

Republican advisor Dan Schnur said that the No on 45 campaign, which opposed extending term limits, originally had planned to do most of its spending outside of the area because its budget was small and the local market’s rates typically are high. But local rates came down, Schnur said, because of a drop in demand.

“(The rates) were a relative bargain,” he said. “My sense is that overall campaign advertising spending was down. Part of that is the recession. Part of that is the difficulty of raising money for a primary that takes place so much earlier in the year than has historically been the case.”

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