ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that the volume of advertising has been on the rise since 2000, reaching a high-water mark in the past couple of election cycles. The volume of advertising during the 2012 presidential elections did not just break records, it pulverized them. The dramatic increase in advertising volume can be seen clearly in Colorado, where residents of the Denver media market were subjected to 55,584 presidential ads in 2012, compared to 22,621 in 2008. That's over 463 hours of television advertising for the presidential race alone, an increase of 146 percent over 2008. As any casual television viewer living in a competitive area knows, election season is synonymous with negative advertising, for good reason: the airwaves are chock-full of attack ads. There is evidence to suggest that as the number of ads increases and the competitiveness of the race increases, there is more issue convergence in political advertising.
