$15M spent on Philly-area political TV ads

“That’s enough money to pay for 250 years of tuition at the University of Pennsylvania.”

So quips the Sunlight Foundation in a comprehensive blog post published today announcing the findings of an unprecedented effort to track political ad dollars in the lead-up to the 2014 elections.

The biggest spender? Gov.-elect Tom Wolf, whose campaign forked over $2.3 million for more than 1,900 ad spots between Sept. 1 and Election Day. Gov. Tom Corbett, the man Wolf unseated, spent about $1.7 million.

The Sunlight Foundation, the Internet Archive, the Committee of Seventy, Penn’s Linguistics Data Consortium and the University of Delaware’s School of Public Policy and Administration teamed up to “capture, record and analyze all the data we could on political advertising” in the Philly TV market, according to the Sunlight Foundation blog post.

The hope is to better understand how political advertising sways public opinion.