30-minute Obama ad shows campaign muscle; "strategic brilliance," "takes the oxygen out of the room"

[DeepModem Mom]

CNN: October 30, 2008
30-minute Obama ad shows campaign muscle
By Richard Allen Greene

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Sen. Barack Obama's 30-minute TV ad, which ran simultaneously on broadcast and cable networks at 8 p.m. ET Wednesday, is muscle-flexing that has little precedent, a campaign advertising expert said.

"It's evidence, if you needed any, that the Obama campaign has more money than there is ad time left to buy," said Evan Tracey, director of the Campaign Media Analysis Group. "This is flexing the muscles." Tracey estimates that it will cost the campaign "in the $4 to 5 million range -- at a minimum, $3.5 million."

But, he said, spending the money is a "no-brainer" for the Democratic presidential hopeful. "The strategic brilliance of this for Obama is that he is going to consume about 24 hours of the news cycle," Tracey said. "It boxes McCain in, takes the oxygen out of the room."...

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There was so much buzz surrounding the infomercial -- which was announced about two weeks ago -- that on Tuesday, Time magazine's Mark Halperin put the ad's two editors on his daily list of the "five most important people in American politics not running for president."

Those editors, Erik Smith and Mark Putnam, were "still in an edit room" cutting the 30-minute piece Tuesday when he published the list, according to Halperin, Time's editor-at-large and senior political analyst.

The ad ran at 8 p.m. ET on CBS, NBC, MSNBC, Fox, BET, TV One and Univision, the Spanish-language network, six days before Election Day....

http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/10/29/campaign.muscle/index.html