Election Spending Has Become a
Waste of Money. Only Advertising is Worse.
Chicago's recent mayoral election demonstrates how broken the system is. Meanwhile, there's no market too small to dissuade Big Pharma from massively advertising its wares.
BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS@TULLMAN
Indifferent and ignorant voters get the results and the leaders they deserve, goes an old political theory. And judging by the recent mayoral election results in Chicago, the city’s citizens certainly got the shaft. The untried and untested mayor-elect was ultimately chosen by less than 20% of the eligible voters. The majority of voters, around 65%, stayed home. They didn’t come, they didn’t care, and they couldn’t be bothered. It was a “meh” mandate for mediocrity, meaningless maxims, and misinformation. An inexperienced guy, Brandon Johnson, a teachers’ union lobbyist who hadn’t bothered to pay his own bills, fines and debts, and wanted to defund the police, is now in charge of a $28 billion budget. Sad but not shocking.
Even after four years of the utterly unqualified and incompetent Lori Lightfoot -- a mayor who’s left the desolate city in shock and despair with newly resumed warm weather wilding -- the voters failed again to select a competent and knowledgeable leader. Of course, Chicago’s not alone in that department. After 4 painful years and all the lessons of Trump’s lack of interest in or any qualifications to lead, it’s still clear that hyper-partisan politics are blinding large parts of the public to the true requirements of successful governance. Too many people look no further than someone’s alleged party affiliation at the polls to make their choices. We know now for sure is that consistently painting Paul Vallas, the losing candidate who was a lifelong registered Democratic, as a closet Republican in a supposedly non-partisan election was the kiss of death given today’s totally tribal political warfare. Nothing else really mattered, although the timely Trump indictment days before the vote was the icing on the partisan cake that made sure that Johnson would limp across the finish line. In Johnson’s case, having a field army of teacher’s union workers to wrangle 30,000 young voters to the polls on Election Day also didn’t hurt. One encouraging prospect is that— at least in Chicago— we won’t have to hear the MAGA morons chanting “Go Brandon” any time soon.
But what’s really shocking is the staggering amounts of money raised, spent, and largely wasted by the two runoff candidates on ugly and angry media, old-world marketing materials, pollsters and doorknockers, and political consultants of every size, shape and flavor. You would think that no one had explained to these guys and their “consultants” that traditional ad media strategies and the old analog channels were dead meat and that the only effective games in town were social media, word of mouth, and precise digital marketing. Millions were wasted with little or nothing to show for the effort or the expenditures. And, of course, thanks to the Supreme Court’s tortured view that money is speech, we only rarely know the sources of the largest chunks of the dollars flowing into these campaigns or the objectives of anonymous donors.
Waste is one of mankind’s worst inventions. Nature doesn’t abide waste. Everything has a use and a purpose, and the world has worked reasonably well (at least so far) because nothing in nature is ever done in vain. It’s only when stupid people insert themselves and their feckless, selfish acts and concerns into the mainstream that our climate, culture, and country are all increasingly imperiled. Nothing seems likely to interrupt this accelerating slide into oblivion because no one who’s getting paid wants to interrupt the flood of funding. And no one in charge or in office is willing to be the first to de-escalate the crazy spending. We can only expect more of same and worse from our political “leaders” even when actually winning an election (much like the dog who catches the car) these days seems like second or third prize and an invitation to years of pain, self-flagellation, and embarrassment. No wonder that anyone with a brain or a real job doesn’t want any of these positions.
In a city struggling with rampant crime, shuttered schools, harrowing levels of homelessness, hospitals constantly closing, and growing food insecurity for thousands of families, two politicians pissed away more than $30 million in a matter of months to ultimately elect a deceitful and chronically underemployed union organizer who was good at pretending to be up to the governance task without ever uttering a word of substance. The people would have been better served and the pols would have accomplished far more if they had just paid each of their few supporters a cash stipend to show up and vote in the old Chicago way. And, if you look at the current state of shooting and looting in Chicago, even before the new guy takes office, it’s clear that there’s unlikely to be much improvement in the unsettling situation any time soon.
We saw the same kind of lucre lunacy and ludicrous spending – around $42 million - right across the state border in another “non-partisan” race for the Wisconsin Supreme Court, which set national records for outlays in that type of contest. At least in that instance, the Democratic backers and funders from across the country got the kind of respectful turnout they were targeting and the MAGA sore loser, conservative Daniel Kelly, got precisely the major 10-point drubbing he deserved from liberal Janet Protasiewicz. Interestingly enough, the outcome analysis to date suggests that the historic win and the margin was largely driven by youth turnout which had little to do with ad spend and everything to do to already well-seated Roe vs Wade anxiety.
While current politics may be one of the most visible and obnoxious levels of excessive ad spending, the problem is far more serious and widespread. Every dollar that any business spends is precious; no one can afford to waste scarce resources on old-fashioned “spray and pray” campaigns or other brute force initiatives based more on faint hopes than hard facts. In the frenzy to get back to business, or to get their businesses back, or to get their story out in the midst of the overwhelming noise and clutter, millions of dollars that should be spent on R&D or productivity enhancements are being squandered on repetitive and useless marketing and ad campaigns which no one wants to see.
It seems like the unending glut of pharma ads – even running the identical ad several times in the same commercial break – is a conscious effort by these advertisers to drive viewers away from traditional broadcast TV. Right now, no industry is spending more on linear TV advertising than Big Pharma. In 2022, the top 10 pharma ad spenders combined for a total of $1.68 billion in TV ad spend. Who, apart from the miniscule numbers of actual sufferers of these exotic “diseases” and conditions, do they think is interested in messages where the list of risks, abuse, and frightening side effects is substantially longer and a more material part of the ad’s content than any benefit claims? Who’s responsible for the seemingly weekly creation of new two and three-letter diseases like TED that no one’s ever heard of, but which may be secretly plaguing them at this very moment? Who is concerned these days about confusing their penis with bent carrots and other supermarket vegetables?
The arcane references, technical language, descriptive behaviors, prohibitions against use with conflicting named drugs, and other cautions are completely unintelligible to 99% of the viewing population. I’m not sure, for example, that anyone even knows what TD or GmG are, and the doctors complain all the time now that patients come in asking for the “purple pill” even before they’ve been examined or diagnosed. You’d think that the FDA had already been defunded at this point – the regulators have completely abandoned any attempts to regulate these ads which nothing more than lists of symptoms to suck sufferers in and catalogues of side effects to cover the vendors’ bases and potential liability.
The other big and relatively new bucket (and check box) is the politically correct and DEI-infused ads that literally litter the latest pitches from almost every agency and brand imaginable. The most striking element of these new offerings and paeans to whatever’s woke this week is that although they’re running on broadcast channels, they couldn’t be more particularly and narrowly targeted to highly specific, ridiculously small, and typically already suffering populations. Do we really need to be bombarded nightly with suggestions that we “PrEP” this (whatever that means) or “Detect” that? You wouldn’t go wrong concluding that the purpose of creating and running these ads has little or nothing to do with actual sales and everything to do with satisfying corporate and political demands and desires to demonstrate virtue signaling.
The latest Bud Lite trans spokesperson debacle (and the bizarre non-apology, non-explanation letter from the Anheuser Busch CEO) is just another example of busting Bud and burning down the house in the alleged name of expanded representation. Of course, now that the Republican old guard has reminded the young and stupid turks in the party that AB is one of their largest donors, they’ve been told to back away from this particular stunt. Amazon’s ad featuring a teenage girl with a prominent mustache that is the absolute centerpiece of the ad is just another tweak waiting to happen. Does anyone believe that these ad campaigns on traditional broadcast TV make the slightest economic sense when the demographics of the actual viewing population continue to skew older and older every quarter?
One of the few smart things that Elon ever did was to spend almost nothing on Tesla advertising while GM, Chrysler, Ford, and Toyota typically spent almost $2 billion a year. At the same time, Tesla’s $3 billion spend on R&D was greater than the combined spends of Chrysler, GM and Ford. Guess who’s still leading the R&D race?
We’re back –
for far too many companies – to the Wanamaker times. In the 1920s, department
store entrepreneur John Wanamaker was the first guy who honestly acknowledged
that at least half of what he spent on advertising was wasted. But that he
didn’t know which half.