Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from radiotopia.

My name is Jody Avrogant.

And this is Media Environment Week. I just came up with that name. But basically, you know, as listeners to this show know throughout the election year, we've been checking in from time to time on some of the big themes of an election season and we've done October surprises and

vpees and debates and so forth and we are kind of in this little stretch where we're

doing a number of episodes that try to help us understand how we got to this current media environment.

We had Josh Levine to talk about the early days was Fox News.

Last weekend on our 2024 analysis special on Sunday.

We talked about the very different media bubbles

that the current campaigns are operating in

from podcast interviews to social media and more.

And now let's go back and trace a little bit of the

history of political advertising and specifically TV advertising which was

the dominant way that politicians advertised up until I guess pretty recently.

But it is still obviously a huge force, no surprise in these final weeks of the race political ads are running rampant.

And those of you who are listening from one of these

seven swing states will certainly agree with what I'm saying and feel that fatigue.

There is more than $10 billion being spent on ads across all media platforms. That is up 13% from

2020, which is a year, mind you, when most people were kind of stuck at home just

staring into screens and so that was a huge year for advertising anyway and we're still up 13 to 15 percent from that.

And of course it isn't just TV and print ads anymore but it's online ads, social campaigns,

micro-targeting as we discussed, all that stuff. But let's focus on the history of TV ads,

how the world of political TV ads was developed,

...