Liberal Party beats Labor Party in campaign advertising stakes and at the polls – ebiquity
The Liberal Party outspent the Labor Party by 67 per cent in election advertising expenditure on TV, radio and press during the five week election campaign, according to exclusive analysis by advertising monitoring group, ebiquity.
The ebiquity figures show the Liberal Party spent $6.75 million, compared with the Labor Party at $4.04 million – a 67 per cent differential.
When comparing the total TV activity for the 2013 campaign against the 2010 campaign, the Liberal party increased the number of commercials run on TV by 15% while the Labor Party decreased their activity by almost 50%.
Says Richard Basil-Jones, managing director – Asia Pacific of ebiquity: “There is no doubt that donors flooded the Liberal Party with funds to spend on the campaign in the expectation they would win, which has worked in reverse with the Labor Party whose advertising fell away this year”.
On TV, the Liberal party outspent the Labor party by nearly 4:1 in the final few days
Week 5 of the advertising campaign is a short week for political advertising on ‘electronic media’ (TV & radio) where a blackout is enforced from midnight on Wednesday, September 4. Even with the short week, the final two weeks dominated the advertising period spend accounting for 76% of Liberal and 52% of Labor activity
Below chart includes TV, Press and Radio spend data
Note – Week 5 in the above summary represents only 4 days for TV and Radio and 6 days for Press
Week to Week Spend by Major Parties + All Other
The big surprises in the campaign outside of the major parties’ expenditure was the emergence of two new players, The Palmer Party ($3.02 million) and Australian Salary Packaging Association ($1.4 million) in third and fourth place – outspending the Greens and the unions.
Mr Basil-Jones said “The Palmer Party made a big impact in advertising terms during the campaign, while the Salary Packaging Association responded quickly and effectively to the Rudd Government’s change of FBT policy in July”.
Spend and Volume by Political Party/Trade Union/Pressure Group
The Palmer Party’s Revolution TV commercial enjoyed the biggest individual spend of the campaign, while the Labor Party’s biggest ad – You Lose – ranked only fifth in the expenditure figures.
Top TV Commercials for the 5 week period (000’s)
Both parties have run a similar number of commercials – 28 for Labor and 26 for Liberal – but the messaging content has been very different.
Labor led the charge with negative advertising in the first few weeks of the advertising campaign; however, the Liberal party has closed the gap in the past week.
Although the Labor Party has run more types of negative TV Ads, the Liberal Party have put more negative commercials to air.
6 Comments
Both the Labor and Liberal campaign teams did as good as could be expected.
Apart from Labor’s questionable ‘New Way’ theme early on in the campaign both teams stuck to their strategy. The LIberal campaign didn’t lose them any votes and Labor’s campaign probably stemmed the bleeding. As always, and much to the ad industry’s disappointment, advertising played a miniscule role in the election outcome. Labor was always going to lose. The Coalition was always going to win.
And guess what? That’s exactly what happened.
There’ll be those in the ad industry who’ll love saying the LIbs won because they outspent Labor etc etc. That would be wrong.
Parties that are clearly going to win, can and will spend more because they can afford to. Parties that know they’re going to lose will spend less because they don’t want to leave the party with a huge debt.
The LIbs spent enough to win. Labor spent enough to give their supporters hope and encouragement – but not one cent more.
Everything else – including media breakdown figures – is purely academic.
I love that “one man’s other opinion” is having a debate with himself.
There is no such word as ‘ebiquity’, featured in your headline. It does not appear in the dictionary. What did you mean? Hopefully if any good comes out of the election of the bumbling George W Abbott, as our leader it will be greater literacy. But with the ‘suppository of all wisdom’ as PM, I’m not optimistic.
Old CD Guy, the answer to that question is in the first paragraph.
Not having a debate with myself, just trying to explain how these things really work to the young and inexperienced.