I used to work at a small rural TV station 20 years ago. Election season was hilarious because all these local people running for office were willing to dish out thousands just to have a crappy commercial they made for themselves play in terrible middle-of-the-night timeslots. For the bigger candidates from the major parties, they paid so much money to get slick ads at the good time slots, that it basically floated the station for the next several months. They were practically rolling in dough and could charge pretty much whatever they wanted... because those campaigns raised ungodly huge sums of money and that was (at the time) seen as the most effective way to spend it. I could just imagine what it was like at the big TV stations in urban areas.
I'm guessing that today it gets thrown around a lot more on internet ads on social media/youtube etc. Local TV is dying as is cable... but it's all a giant money laundering scam to enrich various media companies.
Funny how I just saw TIMECOP again in which the villain states that lots of campaign money wins elections. Well tell that to Michael Bloomberg.
With this last election, I wonder how many votes were actually shifted by advertising. I'm sure at least one or two were, but Trump was able to collect a lot more attention doing zero-budget podcasts like Rogan and Theo Von, etc. while the progressives were putting on huge events. Don't get me wrong, he did plenty of big events too, but how many votes did those actually switch compared to the audiences on free podcasts?
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