The Ad Campaign - The New York Times

Read more: See here

By the time it's over, this year's race for president will cost at least $3.5 billion. Of that, the single biggest expense will be campaign ads. Today, Shane Goldmacher on the story that both campaigns have been telling 30 seconds at a time through those ads.

Yeah, and of course, I'm teasing. The round tables were great. This episode, just FYI, is running on the day before the election. And for a very long time, we have wanted to tell the story of this campaign through advertisements that both campaigns have relied on to try to win over voters.

And it feels kind of fitting that we're going to do that in the last 48 hours of the race, when everyone who has a TV, especially in a swing state, is being flooded with TV ads. In your mind, what has been the story of advertising in this race?

Well, I wonder if you can just explain why television. Not to sound like I don't appreciate the medium, but we do tend to think of it as something that's increasingly obsolete in an era of cord cutting. Why is television still the preferred medium for these two campaigns, given all the theoretical options?

The first answer is that it works, that there's a massive amount of testing on both sides on, what can you do to move people, emotionally? And it's this combination of images and words and sounds and feelings that you can evoke in just a short time, presented to people where they often can't look away. You have to watch it as you're watching football. Live television has become especially important.