June 27, 2007 06:59 PM UTC

How $25 million in the bank, a good message, and 1 great ad can win in 2008

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• by: Mark Mehringer

The way the pundits and media cover the Presidential election, you’d think that anyone not in the top 4-5 in fundraising has no shot at winning the race for President.  But have you ever wondered how much it would really cost to get a candidate’s message out to enough voters?

Well, I decided to do at least a back of the napkin calculation, and discovered that if you can raise and have available $25 million by December, then there’s no reason your campaign can’t be competitive.  The reason is that the media markets in Iowa and Nevada are not that expensive.  For just over $2 million dollars, you could be on the air across each state for 4 weeks, at 1000 points of TV each week.  That’s plenty to get a message through to voters.

The cost of the same amount of TV in New Hampshire (which is mostly the Boston TV market) and South Carolina are about twice that, so you can cover all four states for four weeks each for about $6.5 million.  For $20 million, then, you could get 2000 points a week of TV and have $7 million for field, travel, staff, polling, etc.  And that if you spend the TV dollars fairly inefficiently.

Of course, that doesn’t include Florida, which is fighting for importance by moving their primary to Jan. 29.  Well, on the Democratic side, if you advertise in that primary, you get no delegates per party rules.  On the Republican side, you can help yourself in SC and NH by respecting their importance and ignoring Florida, where only half the state’s delegates would be counted anyway.

So then you hit Feb. 5, and you only have about $5 million of your $25 million left, so you’re sunk, right?  Not if you do two things:

1) Outperform in those first 4 or 5 states – by beating expectations you can refill your coffers, and get lots of free TV time.  Winning early requires a good message, though.

2) Buy an ad during the Super Bowl.  With your leftover $5 million, you make sure to buy at least one well placed ad during the Super Bowl, because you know everyone who votes on Feb. 5 will either see it that night, or during the news coverage the next two days, or on the internet.  Suddenly, your $5 million is enough to reach a huge percentage of the electorate.  Of course, with all your leftover eggs going into one basket, you better make sure that Super Bowl ad is a good one.

So what does this silly little exercise tell us?  You don’t need to raise Clinton, Obama, or Romney type numbers to be competitive.  For a lot less than $100 million, you can get your message out in the early states, and if they like you, that can be enough to carry you to some big wins and better fundraising going forward in February, thanks to the compacted primary and caucus schedule and the timing of the Super Bowl.