[Republished from 2008Central.net]

TNR's Eve Fairbanks offers a plea for reduced surrogates, writing;

I haven't been around forever, but has ever a campaign felt so plagued by gaffes made by non-candidates?

[...]

Do McCain and Obama really need so many minions and representatives covering every cable show, every hour? Can't we do away with this evil proliferation of surrogates?

Indeed.  The campaigns definitely don't need the amount of surrogates and "sortagates" (my word for the person that seems to be speaking on behalf of the candidate, but turns out not to be) that they currently have.  From the campaign's perspective, murky surrogate-land gives them the advantages of having many surrogates to spread their message with the added advantage of being able to distance themselves or disown that individual should they mess up.  That being said, in many ways, the problem with the proliferation of surrogates isn't their increased presence.  Rather, it's the way that the campaigns and the press are using them.

Using surrogates to speak about the advantages of a particular policy position, to engage in debates and to speak on behalf of the candidate at times is a necessary and useful part of presidential politics.  That said, when a person is speaking as a surrogate, it needs to be made clear that they are in fact speaking on behalf of the campaign (and not just espousing their own views).  On the other hand, contrary to acting as a surrogate, when someone is acting as a "sortagate," the press should not treat them as though they were a surrogate.  Here in lies the problem.  The press, with the assistance of the campaigns, has successfully blurred the line between a campaign surrogate and someone that is just advocating/supporting a candidate.  Accordingly, when interviewing sortagates, the inquires should not focus on official campaign positions or responses, but rather, the inquires should be more in the direction of advocacy for whatever position they want to be advancing.

Now, if the press were to re-establish this line, then they would certainly be squandering the ability to gin up controversies and gaffes surrounding sortagates.  So, from a purely selfish perspective, it is highly unlikely that the cable news shows will go to any effort to clarify this mistake.  Perhaps the campaigns will?  Although surrogate/sortagate proliferation benefits them, it does run with the risk of losing control of the daily message because someone unaffiliated with the campaign may have sneezed, and because that sneeze sort of sounded like a curse word, it dominates news for a day.

My prescription: clarity.  The campaigns will likely need to start the effort, by making campaign spokespeople and official surrogates more available for TV interviews, so that the news folks don't have to rely on sortagates.  This will provide them with increased message control, and, could also increase the quality of discourse (given how utterly uniformed some sortagates are).  If the campaigns continue to allow the line between campaign spokespeople and sortagates to be blurred, then it's going to be pretty hard for me to be sympathetic when some stupid mistake from a sortagate blows up the news cycle for a day.  As far as I'm concerned, once a problem is identified, if you don't stop facilitating it, then you're complicit.

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Over the last few days, we've discussed cable advertising in political campaigns and how, too often it seems, Democrats and progressives aren't taking full advantage of its microtargeting potential.  The comments and feedback have been great and we've tried to answer many of your questions.  We hope today's post will answer others by taking a look at how campaigns can put cable to better use.  

Cable offers political campaigns an opportunity to target their voters geographically and demographically at a level that just isn't possible with broadcast television.  But just throwing some money at the top cable networks on the Interconnect is not taking advantage of cable's microtargeting potential.

Buying cable is not easy and it's not quick. It takes hours and hours of research and analysis to optimize a cable buy so that it reaches a campaign's targeted voters and is integrated with the campaign's other communications to those voters.  But when it's done right, it can save money and help turn out votes.

More in the extended entry.

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Media, Advertising, Television, Cable, Media Buying

Yesterday, we revealed the bottom line results, of our study:  if the Democratic organizations buying ads in three Congressional Districts (IA-01, KY-03 and OH-15) would have taken advantage of cable's microtargeting potential, they could have gotten nearly twice as many points on their cable buys at a savings of 30% or more - roughly $52,000 per week.  

Those savings were rooted in four types of waste:

1.    Geographic Waste  
2.    Network Waste  
3.    Programming Waste.  
4.    Frequency Waste.  

We'll take you through each one after the jump.

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For most of the last 30 years, the conventional wisdom in political campaigns - at least at the federal level - was to spend most of the advertising budget on broadcast television.  It may have made sense when broadcast TV was the dominant medium, but it doesn't make sense today.  

The past decade has brought an explosion in new ways to communicate with voters that, combined with new technologies, has made it possible to reach specific, narrowly targeted voting segments. While online ads, mobile communication, and social network organizing all should be considered as part of a campaign's communication planning, one of the biggest shortcomings of Democrats and progressives (as described in yesterday's post) is their failure to take advantage of cable television's microtargeting potential.

A couple facts:  In 2002, for the first time, a bigger share of the TV audience was watching on cable than on broadcast. In 2006, 56% were watching on cable and just 44% on broadcast TV.

So why do so many political consultants continue to recommend that candidates dump most of their communications dollars into broadcast TV?  

More after the jump.

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There really shouldn't be anything scandalous about buying ads for political campaigns.  But anyone who reads progressive blogs knows that there's a lot of concern about how it's being done by and for Democratic campaigns.

Matt Stoller invited us to post a five-part series, beginning today and continuing the rest of this week, to talk about one facet of media buying, cable TV, and to share our analysis of cable buying by Democratic groups in three hotly-contested congressional districts in 2006.  

The analysis begins after the jump.

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