Will the DVR change political advertising?

We all know that very soon we'll be inundated with political commercials. Those of you new to the business might not know that elections are big business to local stations, as it is "easy money." Sales people certainly don't have to go after it, and many politicians have deep pockets.

I was talking to a small business owner yesterday and asked her if she advertised. She said something I hadn't considered... she'd done TV before, but with more and more people getting DVRs she was thinking about going in another direction, as the DVR makes it so easy to skip commercials.

Yes, people have been skipping commercials since the advent of the VCR, but the DVR makes it so much simpler to record everything and watch it all at once. You can whip through commercials in record time.

You may have noticed that the McCain campaign has released a lot of commercials that only "air" on the Internet. The cost? Producing the commercial. No ad time to buy, and the commercial runs as many times as people choose to look at it.

While October isn't a sweeps month, a good "series" (and yes, you can do them out of sweeps months) would be to look at political advertising. How are campaign managers changing their "media buys?" How many people now have DVRs? And how many hits are those spots that run solely on the Internet getting?

This would be a nice series to run right before the election.