The Olympics are a gold mine for advertisers; it's not often you find yourself with a captive audience that isn't channel surfing and can't skip past ads as they watch live coverage. McDonald's and Chevrolet know this — it's why they spend big bucks to run ads during the Games. Hillary Clinton knows it, too; she has put $13.6 million into campaign commercials during the coverage of Rio.
Donald Trump, on the other hand, has requested the advertising rates from states like Florida but not made any moves to get an ad up, The Associated Press reports. "I'd love to know what they're waiting for," Republican ad maker Will Ritter said.
Clinton has plastered Olympic network NBC with ads, a lesson learned from 2012, when Barack Obama and Mitt Romney blitzed the London Olympic coverage with their own promotions. But despite having a fresh $80 million in his pocket, Trump appears to have missed the memo, or is ignoring it entirely. "While the decision not to have big ad buy during Olympics is unconventional, I'm not sure conventional rules apply," Republican National Committee member Steve Duprey told the AP.
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Ritter, though, thinks this is to Trump's own detriment, saying he "cannot survive the professionalized deconstruction that Hillary is doing every day."
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