How Donald Trump Will Damage Media Sales From Election

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
How Donald Trump Will Damage Media Sales From Election

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Presidential, gubernatorial and congressional campaigns fill the pockets of national and local media. Donald Trump will undercut that revenue, unless his competition can raise a great deal more money than they have already and spend a huge portion of the money on media ads directed at slowing Trump’s momentum.

Trump, as has been pointed out on many occasions, is a walking and talking PR machine. The media’s fascination with him allows him to get exposure that other presidential candidates envy. That is unlikely to change.

According to a Washington Post analysis, Jeb Bush spent $157 million to get slaughtered by the electorate. Of the Republicans still in the race, Ted Cruz has raised $100 million; about $46 million is from super PACs and other outside sources. Marco Rubio has raised a total of $87 million, of which $50 million is from sources outside the campaign’s direct fund-raising efforts. Trump has raised $25 million, and none of that is from outside the efforts of his own campaign (much of the money comes from Trump himself).
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The Trump campaign may raise only a modest amount of money, if and when he moves into the general election. This is for the same reason he has spent so little on primaries and caucuses. If he can hold onto his PR exposure, hundreds of millions of dollars the media would have reaped in an election year will be cut to much lower levels.

The windfall of ad dollars that media counts on every four years isn’t coming.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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