Online political ads have been slow to catch on as TV reigns

AFTER being hit with a television advertisement attacking his position on women’s issues, Mike Coffman, a Colorado Republican running for re-election in 2014 to the House of Representatives, did the natural thing: His campaign responded with an ad of its own.

But its first response did not appear on TV screens. Instead, the campaign used an online video ad aimed at the likely audience of the original ad from Andrew Romanoff, Coffman’s Democratic opponent. Choosing digital ads was a way to avoid spending large sums of money on a TV commercial in the expensive Denver media market. It had the added advantage of focusing on the people who might have seen the first ad and spent more time online.