Political TV Advertising

Traditional Advertising Methods

• Television, radio, and direct mail are traditional advertising methods.

Television Advertising

• Television emerged as a new advertising medium in the 1950s during Eisenhower’s campaigns.
• Television has grown into the dominant advertising medium.
• In 2020, ad spending on television reached $8.5 billion, representing a significant portion of campaign spending.

Purpose of Political Advertising

• Ads are useful tools for candidates and campaigns to reach persuadable voters, particularly in competitive states.
• Television ads serve to persuade, inform, and mobilize voters.
• Ads often use emotional appeals and content to activate certain psychological and behavioral responses in voters.

Styles of Political TV Ads

• "Man-in-the-street" ads feature everyday voters explaining their support of a candidate.
• "Sainthood spot" ads celebrate a candidate's life accomplishments and story.
• "News look" ads use news headlines and broadcasts to celebrate a candidate.
• “Cinema-verité” ads feature the candidate working or campaigning on the trail.
• “Talking head" ads feature a candidate sitting in front of a camera and speaking to the target audience.
• "Issue position" ads show the candidate taking a public stance on a policy issue.
• "Apology" ads show the candidate apologizing for an unpopular position or scandal revealed during the campaign.

Radio Advertising

• Radio is still widely used by campaigns.
• Radio ads are more common for lower-level offices because they are cheaper and more accessible.
• Radio ads often use the voiceovers and music from TV ads.

Direct Mail Advertising

• Direct mail is used mainly for lower-level offices for the same reasons as radio advertising.
• Direct mail is an easy way to send a message to a widespread group of people.

Ad Strategies

• Back-and-Forth Method.
• Micro-targeting.
• Racial Cues.
• Emotional Cues.
• Negative/Attack ads.

The Back-and-Forth Method

• A candidate responds with an ad when their opponent airs an ad on some topic or attacking them.
• Campaigns often repurpose snippets or clips from their opponent's ads in a response ad.
• Campaigns can create a response ad within hours and air it within a day.
• The media covers the “sparring” between candidates
• Paid media converts to free media.

From Paid to Free Media

• When a candidate airs an ad, the best possible scenario is for the media to cover it.
• An ad can be aired in a single market for a brief period, and then appear on national television.
• “Going viral” is a key strategy for many campaigns.

Ad Targeting

• Candidates target ads to specific media markets, avoiding national airings.
• Media markets are regions around major metropolitan areas.

Targeting Specific States

• When you target one state with ads, you are likely to end up airing them in surrounding states due to market overlap.
• Candidates air ads in the most competitive markets or states where they have identified the most persuadable voters.

Micro-Targeting in Advertising

• With the widespread expansion of cable subscriptions, campaigns are now able to use channel targeting in their advertising strategies.
• Campaigns target channels like The Food Network or HGTV with lighter, more basic advertisements.
• Similarly, campaigns target cable news channels with more policy-focused ads.

Racial Cues in Advertising

• Campaigns often use racial cues and priming in ads as a recruitment strategy.
• Ads use racially coded terms and themes like "Law and Order", "Inner cities", "Tough on crime", and "Taking our jobs" without explicitly mentioning race.
• This strategy aims to subtly activate voters' racist or non-racist attitudes.
• Candidates can also prime certain identities as a motivator for vote choice, either explicitly or implicitly.

Advertising Effectiveness

• Conventional wisdom suggests that ads are essential for influencing vote choice and can swing an election.
• The effectiveness of presidential ads is questionable due to the strength of partisanship.
• The key questions are whether ads persuade, inform, and motivate turnout.

Huber and Arceneaux Study

• Much prior research has been unable to find a persuasive effect of presidential ads.
• Huber and Arceneaux argue that this is due to a lack of data and experimental drawbacks.
• Their research tests whether advertising engages and informs citizens in the campaign and whether it alters their evaluations of the candidates.
• The study tested this using a "natural experiment”.
• It compares voters in uncompetitive states, who were "treated" with ads because they live in a media market overlapping with another state.
• For example, a Tennessee voter was broadcasted an ad meant for North Carolina.
• There is an absence of evidence that advertising engages voters with the campaign.
• Advertising interest does not increase.
• Results are mixed for informative strength.
• Voters only learned about social security reform, and they rarely adopted the positions of their stated party.
• Strong evidence that ads are persuasive.
• Ads move favorability positively and negatively for candidates.

Voter Persuadability

• Those who are moderately politically aware and knowledgeable are the most persuadable.
• Low-information voters do not care enough about politics.
• High-information voters are too deeply entrenched in their partisanship and have already made up their minds.

Brader's Study on Emotion in Advertising

• Brader states that emotions play a key role in presidential advertisements.
• Ads can use hope, fear, happiness, sadness, and anxiety to bolster their messages and themes.
• Brader designs an experiment where he manipulates the emotional content of ads to test this
• Subjects viewed ads as part of watching a news broadcast.
• Ads were manipulated to be either positive or negative.
• Non-verbal emotional cues (enthusiasm and fear) were added and tested against neutral ads.
• The study did not compare positive ads to negative ads, it compared emotional ads to neutral ads.
• This study found different results for different emotions.
• Voters exposed to enthusiasm + positive ads are more likely to vote and rely on their pre-existing beliefs about the candidates when deciding who to vote for.
• Voters exposed to fear + negative ads are strongly persuasive, motivating voters to rely on new information rather than prior beliefs when deciding who to vote for.

Conclusion

• Candidates need to be strategic in how they use emotions in their ads depending on their advertising goals.
• Positive emotional appeals are likely to be more successful if candidates want to spur turnout.
• Negative emotional appeals might be more successful if candidates want to persuade voters.

Example Ads

• "I Like Ike".
• "Daisy".
• “It's Morning Again in America”.
• "Wille Horton".
• “Windsurfing”.
• "3 AM".
• "America".
• Further examples can be found on http://www.livingroomcandidate.org/.