More money is flooding into the presidential campaigns just as money is mattering less and less.

This is from Matt Bai (who has a book coming out called "The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics"):

The obscene costs of modern campaigning have been driven almost entirely by broadcast advertising, which consumes more than half of your average campaign budget. But even the people who make ads for a living now admit that they are losing their mystical hold over the electorate. This isn’t so much a political phenomenon as a societal one. As a New York ad executive recently told The New York Times, “The dirty secret is, people have been avoiding commercials, bad commercials in particular, for a very long time.”...

In this new world, the most effective political ad makers may be amateurs like Phil de Vellis, the Internet consultant who recently took it upon himself to make a powerful pro-Obama ad, based on a famous Apple spot from 1984, that portrayed Hillary Clinton as Big Brother....

[T]he emerging high-tech marketplace may yet bring us closer to what decades of federal campaign regulations have failed to achieve: a day when candidates can afford to spend less time obsessing over the constant need for cash and more time concerned with the currency of their ideas.

Great.

But will the shift really be to ideas? What sorts of ideas will help you win under the new conditions? Blogs and YouTube chew over all sorts of cute little nuggets -- odd quotations, gaffes, images. It's likely to be just as shallow as old-style advertising, but wild and strange and completely uncontrollable.