Obama Buys Olympics Ad Time

By Ira Teinowitz

It’s official. Barack Obama’s campaign will be among the TV sponsors of NBC’s Olympics coverage.

In the first significant network TV buy by any presidential candidate in at least 16 years, the Obama campaign has taken a $5 million package of Olympics spots that includes network TV as well as cable ads.

The package is less than one $10 million package NBC had offered the campaign, according to NBC’s political file, but well above the $500,000, $2 million and $4 million package of Olympics spots the campaign initially requested information about.

NBC Universal is airing 3,600 hours of Olympics coverage on its broadcast network and cable networks including NBC, CNBC, MSNBC, USA Network, Oxygen and Telemundo.

While some of the Obama spots will air on network TV, the breakdown of how many or exactly when they will air was not immediately available, but it included most dayparts.

The Obama campaign did not return several calls seeking comment on the reasoning behind the buy.

The Obama campaign will join major advertisers including McDonald’s and Anheuser-Busch with a presence on the telecasts from Beijing that begin Aug. 8 with the Opening Ceremonies.

While Rudolph Giuliani’s campaign did a tiny buy to air political ads on “Fox News Sunday” in consecutive weeks, the Obama campaign’s spending on the high-rated and expensive Olympics tops anything that has been done on network TV by presidential candidates in years.

The last network TV spot apparently was a single multi-minute ad Republican Bob Dole ran in 1996.

Since then, presidential candidates have mostly used their advertising dollars to target battleground states, with some in recent campaigns also running national ads on cable television.

Obama campaign officials have said before they were looking at the possibility of doing national advertising and were looking at a variety of options including cable channels such as MTV and BET and potentially the Olympics.

The buy comes as the Obama campaign continues to set fundraising records. Also, its decision to not accept federal matching funds leaves it able to spend as much money as it can raise. The campaign reported it raised $52 million in June, compared with the nearly $21.5 million raised by Sen. John McCain’s campaign.