The maximum possible effect from advertising in 2012 was 1 percentage point of the vote.
I guess that explains why the polling was so skewed … or something.
That report shows derived summaries, not raw data, which make it difficult to double-check or even understand its conclusions. One can click-click toward the actual papers, but they are pay-per-view. The conclusion may be correct, but for these reasons I’d ignore it.
Wait, was it little effect, or was it about 1%? That hardly sounds little to me.
I’m totally confused by this article.
The underlying idea is to leverage "the fact that media markets do not line up with state boundaries to compare counties in non-battleground states exposed to ads from battleground markets (e.g., voters in Massachusetts seeing ads in the Boston market meant for voters in New Hampshire) with other voters in non-battleground states exposed to little or no advertising.
If I read that correctly, they’re looking at states with reduced media influences. But those states are by definition ones in which one candidate started with an overwhelming advantage. They are also states in which candidates do not campaign actively, generating little local news media coverage. In addition, bleed-over media markets penetrate only a small fraction of voters in non-battleground states. Any effect must be small to begin with.
However, in the 2008 election, the given correlations are significant, while the 2012 election ones were not. What changed? They mention incumbency, but the vote split was almost identical in the two elections and neither election was close. Obama was obviously going to be the winner both times, and the only difference was in the number of battleground states he won. So how does looking at non-battleground states affect this?
As septimus notes, this is a summary article but a wholly inadequate one. The effect of advertising on the race is potentially interesting but I can’t pry or tease any pertinent information out of this. What am I not seeing?
The only time that is true, is when you have a situation where any candidate in the race can unilaterally decide to spend nothing at all on advertising, without at all affecting his/her chances of winning.
Did that situation arise anywhere in 2012?
No, it could be true if both sides chose not to run ads. In that case, according to this article, the vote would have been within 1% of what it turned out to be with ads. Or that’s how I read it.
The key word in my post is “unilaterally”. If you the candidate can decide not to advertise, with well-founded confidence that that decision will not affect the result even if your opponent does advertise, then you have an election where advertising has little effect. Otherwise, you do not. The pressure to advertise, all by itself, is an effect, and a most important one, since it (1) forms a “wealth primary” that weeds out any potential candidate with limited fundraising potential (which is not at all the same thing as limited voter appeal), and (2) requires you the candidate to solicit donations from parties whom you will owe after you win.
It seems to me entirely possible that political advertising it’s losing its grip as a major electoral force. I would like to think that is a result of our electorate wising up, but its more likely a result of being numbed. Upside could potentially be huge, being a lessening of the political power of big money donors, from my lips to the Ears.
Such an effect might simultaneously weaken the Republican Party and wean away the Clintonistas from their cozying up to big business. Groovy.
I think so. Kirsten Gillibrand was running for re-election to her Senate seat in 2012. I’m a New York voter and I don’t remember ever seeing an ad from her campaign. She didn’t need any because she had the election in the bag. She ended up beating her closest opponent by forty-five percent of the votes.
I know. My point is that this is a completely unreasonable idea, as you know. But it’s irrelevant anyway. It’s a thought experiment. If ads didn’t happen, for whatever reason, that would be what you compare it to. That goes for both sides.
No, I don’t see that. If one side runs ads, then ads may have had an effect. If both sides don’t, then you have a situation where ads weren’t relevant. I think this study is saying that ads from both sides counteracted each other, but the net result was 1 % of the vote. If only one side ran ads, that would be different.
Yes, that’s the part where your point about unilaterally dropping ads matters, because it’s not a real-world possibility. This study doesn’t call for a candidate to stop advertising, it just says that ads weren’t a big factor in who won because they counteracted the other guy’s.
That’s like saying that pulling on the rope has little effect on a tug-of-war contest.
Well, more like saying that if you have two tug of war teams of 5 guys each, adding another 5 to each team has little effect.
It’s actually not a fitting analogy. Nuclear deterrence is better. If one side has 100 nukes and the other side has 500, which side wins the nuclear war?
At some point, once you’ve gotten your message out, it’s out. If your opponent gets it out twice as much, it doesn’t give your opponent an advantage.
The statistics that show that the candidate that spends more wins include races where an incumbent with name recognition runs against an almost completely unfunded challenger with no name recognition. If you look at races where each candidate had say, $1 million, you can’t predict the winner nearly as easily by looking at who spent more. As with nuclear weapons, once you have enough, you have enough and adding more doesn’t give you anything. But the US and Soviet Union continued to add nukes because for some reason they thought it was important to have more than the other guy.
Nuclear weapon arsenals are themselves a target. So part of MAD was making sure you had enough nuclear weapons to launch a counter-attack even if your enemy was able to get a successful first strike. The perverse logic of MAD said that having fewer nuclear weapons could cause a nuclear war by encouraging an enemy to think he might be able to wipe out your counterstrike capability.
Well, I didn’t say it was a perfect analogy, just better.
The point of advertising is to get a message out, create awareness. Once you’ve done that, you don’t gain much, if anything, from advertising more. Another lesson of advertising is that quality beats quantity. Memorable ads promote products better than boring ads repeated constantly.
Yet professional campaign advisors will keep on spending, because a) it makes their job seem more vital, even though political scientists seem to agree that quality of a campaign is a pretty minor contributor to success or defeat, and b) it’s campaign money. Might as well spend it. You can’t do anything else with it.
A really cool recent example is Independent Womens’ Forum, a third party advertiser favoring Republicans. rather than saturating the airwaves with millions of dollars of advertising like Karl Rove’s American Crossroads Group did(to little effect), they picked races where they thought they could make a difference. Only seven races, to be exact. The candidate they helped won six of them. Most recently, they turned Mark Sanford’s fortunes around by focus grouping the effect of the health care law on the race. They found that if they highlighted the fact that Sanford promised to vote for repeal, vs Colbert Busch, who was unwilling to take any position at all, that had a remarkable effect on voters.
Yes, Adaher, that’s a good analogy.
As for spending the money even when it’s not likely to have much effect any more, one reason is that campaigns make people very nervous, and nobody wants to be left saying “if only I had run a few more ads with that extra money…”
But they can do something else with leftover money - they can save it for next time. And having a nice warchest from the start not only makes life easier, it discourages opponents. Maybe more challengers would be encouraged by this study.
This is wrong in almost every way. Coke has worldwide awareness, yet advertises (in the largest sense, including marketing, promotion, giveaways, product placement etc.) incessantly. Awareness is temporary; people have busy lives and a zillion “products” compete for their attention every minute of every day. Campaign advertising is insultingly overwhelming for those who happen to spend much of their time in front of their tv sets; the target are those who get to tune in only rarely for short periods. Without constant advertising to first create awareness - something that has been shown to require double digit exposure - and then continue awareness to the day of the election, the real purpose is lost. The idea is to get those who are not already heavily committed both to the act of voting and to voting for a particular candidate to the polls. As times change the best methods for greatest return on ad spending will surely change, but your statement as it stands today fails.
They wish. Two of the most memorable ads in history - the Johnson “daisy” attack ad on Goldwater and the Apple “1984” ad ran only once. They had no measurable effect on their product at all. Boring ads repeated constantly - which means normally a full campaign including the internet, billboards, newspapers, magazines, store displays, and whatever else you can think of, in addition to television - drive sales, and reduce loss of market share to the competition. This is Advertising 101. A memorable ad as part of an overall saturating campaign is ideal, but happens so infrequently that it can’t serve as an everyday model.
Thank you for your precise statements on this.
BTW, I notice that you skipped over the posts of those of us who pointed out that the article you cited does not make its case and have gone back to assuming its truth so that you can make your point. If you can’t analyze numbers and statements about them, perhaps you should stop trying to build cases on them. They will get demolished every time.
Your facts don’t prove your case though.
Boring ads likely get tuned out fast. In the case of political ads, exciting ads probably means those with new substance, such as negative ads covering something the opponent did or said that many voters don’t know about yet.
This doesn’t work either. You can’t define informational ads as boring and negative ads as exciting. Informational ads can take many viewing to fully process their content. Negative ads can quickly become boring turn-offs. There certainly is evidence that negative ads can turn voters against a candidate, although with both sides using them their net effectiveness is lessened. That doesn’t imply that softer-sell informational ads can’t be effective.
There is no one format that makes an ad interesting or cause people to watch. Ads can be loud or soft, overt or covert, funny or angry, insinuating or direct. Any or all can make for a good ad. That goes for political ads as much as consumer product ads. The overall effect is probably small, maybe even as small as the cited article claims. But I guarantee that you can’t tell the effectiveness of an ad by whether you think it’s boring or not.