As the election eve issue appeared at newsstands and at doorsteps, a few extra dollars made it into the accounts receivable books at the Daily News. Although to be fair there were surprisingly fewer ads than the ole Podunk thought would be in Friday's last chance for message making edition.
By far the king and champion of the advertising age was Mayor Herb Pond, he was the largest media buyer in the campaign with a total of 7 ads purchased for Friday's final campaign edition. Starting with a Page one banner 11 x 2 inch ad on the bottom emphasizing his Yes campaign. From there Pond's journey in print took him to page two with a 2 x 2 inch corner square, copied over on page three. Flip a few pages and there's Herb again a page seven bottom corner measuring 6 3/4 x 5 inches. We zoom through the sports and classified til we reach page 14 for the next Herb sighting a 2 x 2 inch square. The page 5 ad gets a replay on page 15, with a wrap up 2 x 2 inch square on page 17 a farewell wave in Friday's advertising blitz.
Competitor Gloria Rendell had but a solitary ad in the Daily Friday, a page 3 sidebar measuring 3 inches by 4 1/2.
Only three candidates for council purchased the larger style ads as well. Sheila Gordon-Payne had a 2 x 4 1/2 inch sidebar on the crowded page three destination.
Mario Castelli used more space to get his message across on page 5 with 7 inch by 5 1/2 inch recap of his campaign and what made him seek office this year.
Marty Bowles played up the secrecy angle one final time with a page 17 ad measuring 3 1/4 x 5 inches. His theme was it was time to end that secrecy at City Hall.
The political action group Save Our Salmon replayed their aquaculture is bad ad of a few days ago, taking page 19 as their own with a 4 1/2 by 6 1/2 inch advertisement.
School Board Contender Janet Mirau also took advantage of larger type and more space, with 4 1/2 x 2 box on page 7.
And mercifully it was the final day for those business card ads that have been cluttering up the classified ad pages the last three weeks or so. 15 of the 17 candidates offered up these little snap shots of their campaign pledges. Hoping not to get lost in the mix of the moving sales, garage sales, death notices and even occasional help wanted ads (holy cow how did they get in there?). Two councilors, Cote and Rudolph thought so highly of the approach that they doubled their ads in the section for the final day.Two candidates Brenda Cook and Lothar Shciese chose not to have any advertising, anywhere and as the vote count began to trickle in, they would find that no message, translates into no votes I guess.
Gloria Rendell was the only mayoralty candidate to use the Business Card approach, the incumbent Herb Pond preferring to keep his ads in the more visible locations of the paper.
Pond's high profile approach seems to have fulfilled its purpose, as the returns came in he had jumped to a sizeable lead over his opponent. Apparently his investment in image proving to have been money wisely spent, but judging by the gap in votes, in the end he probably could have saved a few dollars.
Friday's 7 page Pond hop is possibly a record in local municipal politics (Though I believe the Peter Lester era was good for the ad reps too). By comparison Monday's Daily News is going to seem awfully thin in the advertising lineage, good thing Christmas buys are coming up, otherwise ad reps would be going into withdrawal.
No comments:
Post a Comment