The Crazy, Lopsided Math of Campaign 2016's Ad Spending So Far

The Ad Age Presidential Campaign Ad Scorecard is sponsored by The Trade Desk Editor's note: Here's the 17th installment of the 2016 Presidential Campaign Ad Scorecard, a comprehensive view of spending across broadcast, cable and satellite TV as well as radio. The charts below represents a collaboration between the Ad Age Datacenter -- specifically, Kevin Brown, Bradley Johnson and Catherine Wolf -- and Kantar Media's Campaign Media Analysis Group (CMAG). Chen Wu designed the charts. Some context from Simon Dumenco follows. --Ken Wheaton "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted," 19th century department store founder John Wanamaker famously declared. "The trouble is I don't know which half." At this point in the presidential election, we have way more clarity than poor Mr. Wanamaker ever did. Arguably somewhere around 80% of the money spent in 2015-2016 on political advertising for presidential candidates has been wasted -- and we do know which 80%. Remember Jeb Bush? His doomed bid for the presidency maxed out at $80,222,687 devoted to TV and radio advertising -- $4,620,417 by the Bush campaign itself and another $75,602,270 by pro-Jeb PACs and advocacy groups. (That doesn't even count digital advertising, marketing consultants, pollsters, etc.) With a bumper crop of Republican candidates early on, TV and radio stations in 10 states in particular -- New Hampshire, Iowa, Florida, South Carolina, Ohio, Nevada, Colorado, Illinois, New York and Virginia -- experienced a gold rush. Tiny New Hampshire alone saw an astonishing $128,149,328 spent on TV and radio ads targeted to its residents. Now look at how much Hillary, Donald and Bernie (and the PACs and advocacy groups supporting them) spent there. Bottom line: More than $93 million was spent on TV and radio -- in one state! with just 1.3 million residents! -- by a bunch of losers and dropouts. How much was spent in your state? Hover over it in our map. For 45 of the 50 states you'll see a pop-up that lists total TV-plus-radio spending by all the candidates and their PAC/advocacy group supporters during the primary/caucus season to date. For the 10 states listed above that each pulled in more than $10 million in TV-plus-radio spending, the pop-up also offers a breakdown of spending by the Clinton, Sanders and Trump campaigns and their PAC/advocacy group supporters -- or you can scroll down below the map and also see that data shown in bar-chart form, so you can compare and contrast. Note: Five states -- Delaware, Montana, New Jersey, North Dakota and South Dakota -- were not specifically targeted for advertising by candidates (so they don't have pop-ups in our map) during the primary/caucus season. That doesn't mean that they didn't see any ads for the candidates. As noted in our fine print, $31.6 million in presidential campaign spending can be attributed to national cable and national radio buys not targeting any specific state.

The Crazy, Lopsided Math of Campaign 2016's Ad Spending So Far

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