By Monday night, or Tuesday morning at the latest, our discussion of survey “trends” will either be instantly obsolete, or confirmed. Well, maybe not confirmed, but at least made marginally more useful. That’s when the latest SWS poll results will be released.
In the meantime, let’s resume crunching the numbers again (again, keeping the usual caveats in mind).
4. TV advertising has had a marked impact on some, but certainly not all, campaigns. Chiz Escudero is an obvious beneficiary: From a low of 19.3 in November (statistically in the same ballpark as his July rating of 20.2; if the absolute numbers mean anything, however, the slide must have been due to the early end of the second impeachment proceedings in the House), he rose to 23.2 in January and then, after the campaign period officially started (and TV started airing his ads), zoomed up to 35.5 in March.
Ralph Recto and two of his colleagues in the Wednesday Group, Joker Arroyo and Manny Villar, also enjoyed the advantage of effective TV advertising: from the mid-20s in January, Ralph, Villar, and Joker all improved to the mid-30s in March.
The biggest ad spender in the first two weeks of the campaign (as measured by AC Nielsen) enjoyed an even bigger bounce from TV advertising, but because he started low, Butch Pichay is still in the low double-digits. He was 1.8 in July, did not figure in the November survey, improved to 5.6 in January, and (after his “pro-Pichay” ads started airing) rose to 13.7 in March. That’s way more than double, but the question is: Does he have enough time to improve all the way to, say, the relatively safe mid-30s?
5. I think Pichay shares the Biggest Improvement runner-up award with Vic Magsaysay, who rose from 10.1 in January to 22.4 in March. The top honor, of course, goes to Sonia Roco, who virtually tripled her rating from 7.5 to 22.4. But I can’t include Magsaysay and Sonia in the list of TV-ad winners because, in his case, his ads didn’t come in until late this month, and in her case, she is running on, how do we say this, an extremely limited TV budget. In fact, I’ve seen her ad only once.
Something else must be at work in their campaigns; if you have a handle on this (aside of course from the usual suspect, name recall, however vicarious), let me know!
6. In the 2001 elections, Villar and Joker were consistently in the 30s, in the (SWS) surveys. It seems to me that, this year, their heavy advertising on television has been, at least in the first month of the 90-day campaign, an expensive attempt to recover lost ground.
7. Among the heavy TV advertisers, Sonny Osmena seems to me to have had the smallest bang for the buck: from 17.9 in January, he improved to only 21.9 in March. He has one ad about his grandfather’s legacy, another one about e-VAT, and a third about the Osmena “brand.” Perhaps he’s muddling his message?
