November 01, 2010 10:34 PM UTC

No Escape, Even on Hulu

• 2 Comments
• by: Colorado Pols

If you’ve got a TiVO or a similar digital video recorder, you’ve been blessed with the ability to fast forward through the millions of dollars in campaign ads presently showing on every possible channel. When your kids come up to you and start asking you about, for example, the mature subject matter in U.S. Senate race because they saw it on Disney Channel, the moral introspection that follows is kind of inevitable. It’s brutal out there.

Lots of people have turned to online streaming video services like Hulu recently as an alternative to cable TV, and we have no doubt the saturation of campaign ads has encouraged people to do so in the last couple of months. But although you see fewer ads on Hulu, you still see on average one thirty second spot each commercial break. And in Colorado, on Hulu, here’s what you’re more than likely going to see on just about any program:

That would be an ad from Women’s Voices Women Vote, hitting Ken Buck. When this group announced its high six-figure media buy in Colorado a few weeks ago, it was advertised as a “multi-media” campaign–this is clearly what they meant. We’ll never get to, of course, but we’d love to see the metrics they’re able to get for these spots, which show during every commercial break. WVWV should get back more information about who is seeing this spot with streamed programs than any other broadcast medium, which would be worth a premium over buys in other formats.

And there’s no escaping the din until tomorrow, folks.