April 08, 2010 02:31 AM UTC

NRCC touts what turns out to be another small anti-Markey ad

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• by: BobMoore

The National Republican Congressional Committee on Wednesday began a weeklong cable TV ad campaign criticizing Rep. Betsy Markey for “flip-flopping” on health care. See the NRCC press release and ad here:

http://www.nrcc.org/news/Read….

The party group has similar ads against four other Democratic House members: Scott Murphy of New York, John Boccieri of Ohio, and Suzanne Kosmas and Allen Boyd of Florida.

The NRCC, like most political organizations, doesn’t disclose how much it’s spending on a particular ad, though broadcasters have to make that information available to the public. But if the other districts are like Colorado’s 4th Congressional District, the ad buys are pretty small by political standards. Sometimes, political groups put out press releases announcing an ad campaign with the hopes of garnering free media coverage of what is in reality a small buy that wouldn’t have gathered much of an audience on its own.

Public records show the current NRCC campaign will cost $12,276 and will run on cable systems in Fort Collins, Loveland, Longmont and Greeley.

The ad follows up on a $1,725 campaign in late March on NoCo5, a Cheyenne-based TV CBS affiliate with a limited reach in Northern Colorado. The NRCC hyped that ad with a press release that said Markey “is the first of many Democrat targets that can expect to see the ad running in their districts in the coming weeks, courtesy of the NRCC” and a spokeswoman told me in an e-mail it would be a “significant buy.”

Side note: It appears the NRCC stopped sending me press releases on its TV ad buys after I looked up its actual spending on the March ad and reported it in a story Sunday; but it put its latest Markey release on its Web site. See my Sunday Coloradoan story here:

http://www.coloradoan.com/arti…

The NRCC efforts in Colorado’s 4th Congressional District were dwarfed by two ad campaigns at the end of March by two Democratic-connected groups that thanked Markey for voting for the health-care bill March 21.

Those two campaigns — detailed in the Sunday story linked above — cost $271,000, with the bulk of the money going to buy time on Denver network-affiliated stations. Those stations are significantly more expensive than cable television but also reach a bigger audience (only 58 percent of households with television nationally subscribed to basic cable in 2007.)