THE 2012 presidential campaign is the most expensive US election in history, at an estimated cost of $2 billion (£1.24bn).
In Colombus, Ohio, alone last night, 11 political adverts were aired on the local NBC channel in the space of 20 minutes.
One told voters that president Barack Obama has not proposed a legitimate economic plan for the country. Another suggested that policies of Republican candidate Mitt Romney would undermine the future for America’s children.
Ohio is being inundated with competing adverts in the final days before Tuesday’s election, as Mr Obama and Mr Romney look to win the state’s 18 votes in the electoral college which formally chooses the president to take them towards the 270 needed to win the White House.
The presidential race is now a fight in eight or so politically divided “swing” states, but nowhere more so than Ohio. Amid the chaos of the campaign’s closing days, the state has become an arena for credibility-stretching banter, and a testing centre for the growing science of political advertising.
The most expensive campaign in US history and the free-spending independent groups that have poured more than $200 million (£124m) into political adverts – many of them directed at Ohio – have given analysts a chance to examine lingering questions about them.
Election-year political ads are a meticulously studied subject, and increasingly are used to target specific groups and encourage specific results.
Some research, for example, suggests that pro-Democrat ads are particularly effective at swaying voters’ opinions, while pro-Republican ads typically are more effective at getting party supporters to show up at the polls.
For all the analysis, academic and commercial research has yielded few answers on the precise impact that adverts have in determining who wins an election.
That is especially true, analysts said, in the type of advertising free-for-all that Ohio residents are seeing now – wave after wave of ads with overlapping and similarly dark, daunting messages.
Campaign ads became tiresome long ago for many residents of the Buckeye State, but some viewers figure that the ads must be working, or the campaigns would not keep running them.
However, one Republican congressional candidate in Massachusetts has launched an unusual advert that claims to give viewers a rest from the relentless barrage of political ads.
The entire 30-second cable TV spot for Richard Tisei features a gentle tide rolling in at sunset on picturesque Good Harbor Beach in Gloucester. At the bottom of the screen are the words: “Because you need a break from all the campaign ads.”
Aside from Tisei’s “I approve this message” at the outset, the only other spoken words come off screen from a woman who exclaims: “Aaahhh, that was nice.”