Opinion: Obama spends on TV ads in Pa. to force Clinton’s hand

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He may be lagging in Pennsylvania polls, but Sen. Barack Obama is outspending Sen. Hillary Clinton by about three-to-one in the statewide television advertising campaign, according to an independent analyst. Even if Obama can’t overcome Clinton’s apparent voter advantage in that April 22 primary, Obama plans to make Clinton pay for the fight and draw down her more limited resources for the ongoing struggle elsewhere.

‘He has dropped a couple million bucks in his first week on the air there,’ says Evan Tracey, chief operating officer for Campaign Media Analysis, a TNS company, an independent analyst of campaign media advertising. ‘If you judged it against Clinton’s, in a basketball game, it would be a rout.’

The Obama campaign is spending about $150,000 a day now on TV advertising in Pennsylvania, Tracey said in an interview, compared to about $50,000 for the Clinton camp.

Since Obama turned on his TV campaign in the Keystone State on March 21, Tracey said, he’s spent about $2 million. Since Clinton started her ads there on the 25th, she’s spent about $440,000.

‘Part of it is putting his fundraising advantage to work,’ Tracey said. “If he spends a lot there, she has to spend a lot to keep up with him…. He is buying at high levels, a strategy to bring her into a war of attrition she can’t afford.’’

‘Strategically there is no downside to it,’ Tracey added. Obama ‘is not going to burn through his cash… He floods the state with a couple weeks of ads… If he doesn’t see any noticeable tick in the polls he might pull back… But any dollar she spends in Pennsylvania is a dollar she can’t spend in Indiana or North Carolina…Tactically, you’re forcing her to get into a fight.’

With a half-dozen media markets in Pennsylvania, the biggest and costliest are Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.

By one media account, Obama is purchasing close to 2,000 ‘gross ratings points’ of advertising in these markets – enough for the typical viewer to see an an ad 20 times during a cycle of ads. But the quality of those points is also critical –- with news programs and prime-time TV costing more money. He’s also bought a lot of prime-time TV, putting close to 40 percent of his money there, Tracey says. That’s a good way to ‘expand your coalition,’ he notes.

-- Mark Silva

Mark Silva writes for the Swamp of the Chicago Tribune’s Washington bureau.