Earlier this week on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, libertarian billionaire Charles Koch lamented that his campaign donations haven’t accomplished all that much.

Well, Charles Koch is a smart man, as multi-billionaires tend to be. But he shouldn’t be surprised. Political contributions seldom accomplish much. If you want to change the system, there are a lot of better places to put the money.

Political contributions tend to flow into the hands of the political consultants who actually run campaigns. Those consultants tend to want to put the money into television ads, in part because TV ads produce a tangible product (“see, here’s what we did with your money”) and, probably more significantly, because the consultants get a commission on the television ad buys.

The problem is that television ads — the “killer apps” of political campaigning from the 1960s to the 1980s — are increasingly losing ground to digital. The days when most of the country was glued to the three big TV networks at night are long gone, and many ads don’t reach all that many people or fail to reach the targeted audience efficiently. No doubt people’s receptivity to ads has declined in response to increased familiarity with politicians’ broken promises. People tune the ads out, or respond cynically, because they’ve seen a lot of political ads on TV, and then they’ve seen what the politicians do once they’re elected. Like Charles Koch, they’re disappointed.

Read the article “Advice to the Koch Brothers: Invest in Media, not Politicians” on usatoday.com.