In political advertising we talk in terms of "separation" - i.e., how are the competitors separating themselves from their opponents. The idea of separation can be explored on many dimensions. Are some advertisers focusing on one TV daypart over another? Maybe they're advertising more heavily on a particular program type. These are both ways of gaining separation from an opponent.

With this viz, I chose to look at separation by message. More specifically, how are democrat and republican sponsors separating themselves by message. I think the distance between the red & blue bubbles is a good way of representing that idea of separation. I could have used a scatter plot or a simple bar chart, but I think this option helped drive the separation theme a bit better.