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Open Mike: Ads for Bloomberg Pump $2M Into Arkansas MarketsLock Icon

6 min read

The Bloomberg Effect is reverberating in Arkansas, with the former New York mayor’s presidential ads flooding screens and pumping close to an extra $2 million into three state advertising markets.

Just weeks after the Wall Street Journal’s front page proclaimed “Bloomberg’s Huge Spending Transforms 2020 Campaign,” describing a projected $320 million in TV and digital ads nationwide, the founder of Bloomberg LP is on a marketing spree. The ad gusher is even driving up the cost of political spots televised here and across the country.

The billionaire ranked by Forbes as the eighth-richest American has gobbled up air time since mid-November in the Little Rock, northwest Arkansas and Jonesboro markets, John Link of Advertising Analytics LLC told Arkansas Business.

“Bloomberg spending in Arkansas, by market, is $1,038,299 in Little Rock-Pine Bluff, $586,649 in Fort Smith-Fayetteville-Springdale-Rogers, and $382,537 in Jonesboro,” said Link, vice president of sales and marketing at the Alexandria, Virginia, analytics firm. Advertising Analytics’ latest report calculates Bloomberg’s campaign has spent $357 million nationwide: $260 million on broadcast TV , $24 million on cable ads, $9 million on radio and $64 million on digital marketing.

Until last week, Bloomberg, who is running as a Democrat, had the Arkansas field to himself. Bernie Sanders, the self-described democratic socialist also in the Democratic field, booked $14,000 worth of ads ending this week, Link said, calling Sanders “the only other presidential advertiser active in Arkansas.”

Arkansans Like Mike

Bloomberg is focusing particularly on Arkansas, one of 14 states participating in the crucial Super Tuesday primary on March 3. Little Rock Mayor Frank Scott Jr. endorsed the 78-year-old billionaire last week, and Bloomberg traveled to Little Rock in November to personally file for the Arkansas Democratic primary. The candidate also marched last month in Little Rock’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day parade.

“He’s made Arkansas a focus, and the money is flowing here as it is across the country,” said Bailey Moll, public relations specialist at JPJ Consulting in Little Rock. The Super Tuesday states, including Texas, California and North Carolina, are crucial races for Bloomberg considering his late start in the race. The 14 Super Tuesday primaries will determine 40% of the delegates to the Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee in July.

The Bloomberg campaign has hired 1,000 staffers nationwide, including former Clinton operative Greg Hale, former state Democratic Party official Evan Tanner — now Bloomberg 2020’s state director — and Anna-Lee Pittman, who is on leave from the Clinton Foundation.

And Bloomberg isn’t skimping on campaign salaries, either, with job postings offering field organizers $6,000 a month, and state data directors up to $12,000 a month. Through mid-January, the campaign had spent $16 million for Google marketing and nearly $7 million on Facebook. But the big windfall has been Bloomberg’s $193 million spend so far on TV.

Executives at each of Little Rock’s network TV stations, which rely on a bounty of political ads for a revenue bump every two years, did not respond to requests for comment on this story. Neither did general managers at stations in Fort Smith, northwest Arkansas and Jonesboro.

Ad Rates Climb

But local media buyers and national ad trackers say Bloomberg’s spending this early in a presidential campaign is monumental and unprecedented. “During political cycles, rates definitely go up,” said Ken Griffey of the Griffey Agency Inc. in Little Rock. “That’s especially true in a heated presidential race like this.”

Griffey said the kinds of ad rate spikes reported in other Super Tuesday sites like Houston (up 40%) and Charlotte, North Carolina (27%), haven’t been seen in Little Rock. “The impact we’ve seen locally has not reached that level,” he told Arkansas Business. “It’s much lower,” but it’s still affecting political tactics in down-ballot races.

“Imagine a political strategist with their media team sitting down with a congressional candidate projecting months in advance what media dollars they’re going to need to reach the audience, only to find out months later that a presidential candidate such as Bloomberg has chosen Arkansas as a state to target. Now the earlier projection of media expenditures is understated, and they’re in a position of their dollars not going as far. He’s affecting the amount of money coming into Arkansas outlets.”

Though individual stations had no comment, Tegna Inc. of Tysons, Virginia, which owns KTHV in Little Rock and KFSM in Fort Smith/Fayetteville, says the 66-station chain expects to generate more than $300 million in political advertising this year. CEO Dave Lougee trumpeted that figure in a corporate earnings call on Tuesday. “There is a lot of understandable exuberance within the broadcast sector due to 2020 political advertising,” he said.

The major cash outlay has vaulted Bloomberg, whose fortune is calculated at $35 billion to $61 billion, to third or fourth place in some national polls, though his path to the nomination is uncertain. With an avowed mission to defeat President Donald Trump, Bloomberg said he entered the race out of concern that leftward candidates like Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., wouldn’t stack up well against the incumbent, and that former Vice President Joe Biden had too much political baggage. Bloomberg has also promised, whether he’s still in the race or not, to keep up the anti-Trump ad barrage through November. He’s also committing $15 million to $20 million to the registering 500,000 new American voters by November.

Bloomberg’s spending has “obviously been additive to the primaries,” said Lougee, whose company owns several stations in Texas, increasingly seen as competitive for Democratic candidates.

Commercials Feature Obama

Ads featuring clips of Bloomberg with former President Barack Obama are on heavy rotation now in Arkansas, appealing to black voters expected to be key in Southern primaries. That comes against a backdrop of criticism for Bloomberg’s previous support of New York’s discontinued “stop and frisk” policy, in which police disproportionately stopped black young men for questioning and weapons checks. Last week, Bloomberg apologized after widespread coverage of a recording that captured him defending the policy five years ago. “I don’t think those words reflect how I led the most diverse city in the nation,” Bloomberg told reporters Wednesday in Chattanooga, Tennessee, “and I’ve apologized for the practice and the pain it caused.”

The candidate is also drawing fire for the heavy spending itself.

Sanders and Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, another Democrat, spoke last week on Bloomberg’s big spending. Sanders said he doesn’t resent Bloomberg’s wealth, “but I have a problem with multibillionaires thinking they can literally buy elections.” Klobuchar told NBC she’s eager to debate Bloomberg, figuring she can beat him on the debate stage if not on the airwaves.

Total political spending this cycle could top the $12 billion record set in 2016, media research firm Borrell Associates of Williamsburg, Virginia, has reported, and eMarketer projects $4.3 billion in spending on TV ads alone, including about a billion from the Trump re-election campaign. Digital advertising is also likely to break the $1 billion ceiling this cycle, eMarketer said.

“Bloomberg has spent hundreds of millions of dollars across 14 states, including Arkansas, apparently using the same strategy that he used in running for mayor of New York, where he outspent his opponents 5 to 1,” said Griffey, the Little Rock media buyer. “It’s a big pool of money, and it has many effects.”

Facing higher costs for air time, candidates competing for space have two options, Griffey said. “They can attempt to raise more money to cover the added costs, or they can cut back their ad campaign by a week or so. You don’t want to cut down on the frequency of your ads, because you have to have a certain GRP level.”

That refers to gross rating points, a measure of ad effectiveness calculated as a percentage of the audience reached multiplied by the number of times they were exposed to a commercial.

“Some candidates,” Griffey said, “will choose to do another event or two with donors just to keep those more expensive ads playing.”

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