In 2004, John Kerry spent so much of his advertising budget on broadcast-television warhorses like Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune that he at least deserved a wardrobe courtesy of Botany 500. George W. Bush threw millions at TV too (he favored Cops and JAG), but his ads also appeared on cable, talk radio, blogs, the Internet and, in several cases, closed-circuit televisions above health-club treadmills. "We took one message and designed lots of different avenues to communicate it," says Matthew Dowd, Bush's chief strategist in '04. "They took a lot of different messages and drove them all into one big funnel."
So...