It’s coming and it’s not the football playoffs. At the turn of the year, as we dive headfirst into primaries season you won’t even have time to grab the remote as an unprecedented tidal wave of political advertising crashes over us like nothing we’ve ever seen before. Worse still, the marketing dollars are going to be just as scary as the fight.

Early estimates put the total political ad spend in the run up to the Presidential election at a record-busting $3 billion. Yes, $3 billion. Care to guess how many minutes of advertising this adds up to? Here’s an unofficial calculation: every minute you spend in a voting booth equates to 30 minutes of political advertising. So say you spend five minutes casting your vote, that means you will witness a whopping 150 minutes, or 2 1/2 hours, of the very best political advertising this country can offer – all in return for your right to vote.

One reason that campaigns spend so much on advertising is because their creative product is so criminally terrible. All advertising preys on our emotions but political advertising loves to hate. Night after night, day after day, we hear over and over again how bad one candidate after another is. No wonder there is so much cynicism in our government.

When it’s not talking smack about an opponent it perpetrates and perpetuates the unimaginable: the scene where the politico smiles and waves to us with his loving, supportive family from the homestead. Any marketer in the real world would be justly fired for approving such work. Have you ever wondered where these creative geniuses go between political campaigns?
This is all nuts. No marketer worth his or her salt would ever look at a collective $3 billion ad spend with only one winner as a strong Return on Investment. No client building brand share would ever green light the kind of creative nonsense we’re about to see. But still it comes.

So what exactly should we expect? What show stopping gems can we count on to break up the mundane experience of Grey’s Anatomy and Heroes? Well the first thing to know is that we’re going to see the political equivalent of ultimate fighting. With no incumbent running for the first time in the past three presidential races and no Vice President angling for his boss’ job that’s a big, open playing field likely to get very messy. Unfortunately that mess is going to land squarely on our TV and computer screens, no matter how far back we sit.

While that is irritating news for anyone without TiVo, it’s actually a real business issue for regular marketers. A presidential race means a slurry of weak, annoying or even numbing ads, an open race means even more. Airtime is going to be in critically short supply for anyone wanting to sell groceries or cars or insurance. Or just about anything else. Marketers and their agencies are now seeking other innovative ways to get their marketing messages heard by consumers who are turned off by advertising and trying to get by in a faltering economy.

And what about those messages themselves? In the last race President Bush painted John Kerry as a wavering liberal about to cut the defense bill and him as the steady field commander in troubled times. This time round watch the parties take up the fight. Expect to see combative moralizing: wounded soldiers and lonely families versus slow-mo flags wavering over patriotic troops.

The real issue – and very raw danger – for candidates in the 2008 race for our attention, however, is something entirely different. We’ve seen personality attack advertising for decades but with the big bang boom of websites such as YouTube much of the really targeted messaging of this campaign season could be coming from a very unregulated source: us. In an unprecedented environment of empowered public creativity and accessibility to worldwide sharing of information, the new ad production studio of today is now sitting on a dining room table or a desk at home. In a million homes.

Enter into evidence the YouTube sensation remix of Apple’s groundbreaking “1984″ spot that aired during the Super Bowl that year. As a reminder, a woman athlete runs at a screen portraying a Big Brother figure lecturing servile drones. The hammer gets tossed. The screen smashes and the Apple logo rises. Reinvented for today’s brand conscious, politically charged public by some anonymous source that should really be in advertising, or maybe already is, the Big Brother on the screen is Hillary Clinton. The Apple logo becomes an O for Obama. The Obama campaign denies any connection with the viral spot, but that’s not the point. It’s out there and there are countless more being crafted in the wings on each side.

So take a deep breath before January when the floodgates open. The mudslide is coming, everyone will get dirty and marketers are about to take a bath.