How to spend it

摘要

At the height of the dotcom boom, some newspapers and magazines found it hard to print enough pages to absorb all the advertising that firms were willing to buy. Something similar is happening in North Carolina, this year's most expensive Senate race by some distance. Around $87m has been spent already, or $9 for every North Carolinian, and the campaigns are not done yet. Some of it is old fashioned: three campaign spots air on television every five minutes on average. Some is creepily well targeted: as your correspondent walked into a studio in Raleigh to watch Thom Tillis, the Republican challenger, on October 21st, his phone started pushing adverts enumerating the many ways in which Mr Tillis has demonstrated his perfidy.