Solid Ratings for Obama-mercial

NYT: October 30, 2008, 12:06 pm
Solid Ratings for Obama-mercial
By Brian Stelter

More than 20 percent of American households watched Barack Obama’s 30-minute campaign commercial on Wednesday night, according to preliminary ratings.

In the top 56 local TV markets, the household rating for Mr. Obama’s message was 21.7, Nielsen said. The rating indicates the percentage of homes that watched the program. While it will be impossible to judge how many undecided voters the infomercial reached, Mr. Obama’s message clearly reverberated across the country, drawing more viewers than most prime time programs.

The commercial was particularly high-rated in several battleground states. According to Nielsen, 29 percent of households in the Philadelphia media market, 28 percent of households in the West Palm Beach/Ft. Pierce, Fl. media market, and 27.2 percent of households in the Greensboro/High Point/Winston Salem, N.C. media market viewed the ad.

The ad was “big, glossy and almost unavoidable,” Jim Rutenberg observed Wednesday. The commercial was shown on four broadcast networks (Fox, NBC, CBS, and Univision) and four cable channels (MSNBC, BET, TV One, and NY1). BET and TV One were not included in Nielsen’s estimate.

“If Barack Obama fails to win the election, perhaps the networks should hire him to entertain viewers on Wednesday nights,” The Hollywood Reporter suggests. The household ratings for the ad “outperformed the usual programming in the time period.” ABC, the only one of the big four broadcasters that did not run the ad, wound up in fourth place among 18- to 49-year-old viewers....

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/30/solid-ratings-for-obama-mercial/