Nielsen released an interesting study yesterday…

Advertising spending for the full year 2006 rose 4.6% over the same period last year due to gains across major media, according to preliminary figures released today by Nielsen Monitor-Plus, the advertising intelligence service of The Nielsen Company.

Advertising spending increased in most reported media, led by Internet (35%), the top 100 Spot TV markets (9.1%), Spanish-Language TV (8.1%) and Outdoor (8.1%).

National newspaper ad spending was up 2.9 percent, while local newspaper ad spending was down 3.6 percent.

Way down in the release, however, was an interesting analysis of political spending…

For the 2006 mid-term elections, a total of 2,629,685 local television spots ran representing 93% of all political ad expenditures, and that was up by 24% from 2002 mid-term elections.

41% of all political spots in 2006 were classified as negative. Leading the way in negative ads among the top advertisers was the Republican National Committee and the Democratic National Committee with 89% and 85% of their ads being labeled as negative.

And here’s how our governor’s race played out, according to Nielsen…

Candidate ………. Number of Spots .. % Negative Spots
Rod Blagojevich …… 34,665 ……………….. 66%
Judy Topinka ………… 9,923 ……………….. 67%

Man, did she ever get buried. Also, the governor’s campaign has tried to say they ran a mostly positive effort. Not according to Nielsen.