A blockbuster election is on the way. Group M, a media investment adviser, recently estimated that the 2020 election would generate $10 billion in political advertising, up 59% since 2016, when the number was a mere $6.3 billion — and far outpacing 2002, when the total was $2.1 billion.
It’s a quirky business, though. Kantar, an ad analysis group, predicts that 43% of all that political advertising in 2020 will be seen in battlefield states.
On a historical note, a learned source has pinpointed the dawn of negative political advertising — and it is a lot earlier than we thought.
“The origins of negative campaigning probably concur with the emergence of political competition and electoral campaigns. Sources go back to 64 BC, when Quintus Tullius Cicero, probably among the first spin-doctors in the world, drafted a letter of advice to his brother, Marcus Tullius Cicero, then running for the consulate. He insisted on including ‘negative campaigning’ in the campaign, to remind the people ‘of what scoundrels your opponents are and to smear these men at every opportunity with the crimes, sexual scandals, and corruption they have brought on themselves,’” notes a new analysis from French Politics, an academic journal which also citing the 1800 presidential race between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson as an example of an aggressive historical campaign.
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