Stakeholders will be spending big on 2014 ACA ads
If you think you’re seeing a lot of Obamacare ads right now, just wait until 2014.
No other piece of legislation has engendered such massive ad efforts as the Affordable Care Act, say marketing experts. They expect television ad spending to double in the next year and a half as people start to enroll for coverage and the health law remains a top political issue in House, Senate and gubernatorial races in 2014.
That will put ad spending close to the $1 billion mark, Kantar Media projects. And that’s just television — print and online will boost it even higher.
One reason for the big bucks is there are so many different kinds of stakeholders in the Obamacare fight.
It’s not just ideological proponents and opponents battling over messaging with an eye on 2014 voters. Some of the ads are from state and federal governments trying to clear up confusion and get people to enroll in the health insurance exchanges that go live Tuesday. And some are from health insurers and other commercial groups that have a stake in getting people — potential clients — to get covered.
“It’s really unprecedented what we’re going to see,” said Dhavan Shah, director of the Mass Communication Research Center at the University of Wisconsin. “It’s going to be vast amounts of spending to get people inside [the exchanges], … but you’ve got tremendous political opposition on the right. It cuts both ways.”
States, insurers and the federal government are all joining the battle playing out over the airwaves and cyberspace to control what people hear about the health care law as the six-month open enrollment season starts. The online ads play a double role; they can both message and, with a simple click, take people directly to the exchange sign-up portals.
And politically, both sides are going to try to seize control of the message. There is probably going to be a lot of state-to-state variation on how well the rollout and the first year of health coverage goes — and part of that will
reflect decisions that governors and legislatures have made about whether to run an exchange or have the feds do it and whether to expand Medicaid or leave some of the poorest people in the state uncovered. And that will become campaign fodder.
With 36 governors races plus a bunch of competitive House and Senate seats for which the health law will be a front-and-center factor, the ad wars will be big and bitter.
Nearly a half-billion dollars has been spent on Obamacare-themed advertising since the law passed three and a half years ago. Most of that was for critical ads from the National Republican Congressional Committee, Crossroads GPS and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, according to an analysis by Kantar Media. The Department of Health and Human Services was the only major advertiser on the advocate side, spending nearly $80 million.
But Kantar projects that spending to reach $1 billion by March 2015, the law’s fifth anniversary.
Where that money gets spent will be determined by the competitiveness of states’ House and Senate races, whether state officials have welcomed the law’s provisions and how many residents stand to benefit from it.
“Republicans will get Democrats on it; you could have Democrats advertising on it depending on where they are,” said Elizabeth Wilner, vice president of Kantar’s Campaign Media Analysis Group. “Then you
overlay that with states that are home to high proportions of uninsured people.”
Medicare and Medicaid are the most comparable to the Affordable Care Act — but little data exists on how much advertising they generated. And neither program invoked near the level of friction surrounding the health care law. Plus, political culture was different decades before Twitter, cable, the Drudge Report and HuffPo.
Republicans in Washington may not stop trying to defund, delay or dismantle Obamacare, but the arguments may change after the sign-up starts. Even the president says he expects “hiccups” and glitches.
reporting in
Originally Posted by playwrite
