The evolving “Wild West” of political advertising

We’ve all seen a lot of political ads lately. But in battleground states, it’s a tsunami. Jack Levis is an independent voter in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, which makes him one of the most desirable voters on the planet: “Emails, texts, phone calls, it’s in my news feed, it’s in social media. In the last two days, I counted, I had 30 spam emails in there all about the election,” he said. “It’s unbelievable.”

Not to mention TV and radio commercials. “Come on, it’s everywhere!” he laughed. “Are you kidding me? Ad after ad after ad!”

Erica Franklin Fowler, co-director of the Wesleyan Media Project, which tracks campaign advertising, and co-author of “Political Advertising in the United States,” says she actually enjoys watching political ads. But, she adds, “I will first apologize to all of the residents of battleground states, because I feel their pain.”

Asked if political ads actually convince anybody, Fowler said, “Political advertising does not have the sort of massive influence that sometimes citizens think that it does. Political advertising really only matters at the margin. That doesn’t mean the margin doesn’t matter, right? The margin in this competitive election cycle is going to be the difference between making it into the White House and not.”

And what about negative versus positive messages? “There’s no doubt that negativity is more memorable,” she said. “It is more emotion-provoking.”

We may hate those attack ads, but Fowler says the positive ones don’t say much. “Citizens hate negativity,” Fowler said. “Negative ads tend to be more policy-based, more issue-focused, and those details actually are very important for citizens who don’t otherwise pay a lot of attention to politics.”

It used to be that we all saw the same ads. In 1964, Lyndon Johnson’s “Daisy” commercial implied that his opponent, Barry Goldwater, would launch a nuclear war; and in 1988, George W. Bush’s infamous “Willie Horton” ad made his opponent, Michael Dukakis, look dangerously soft on crime.

But these days, you and I won’t see the same messages. It’s not just three TV channels anymore. According to Tiffany Rolfe, chief creative officer at the ad agency R/GA, “Everything has become a media channel, in a way.”

She says that targeting ads towards individual voters, by location or demographic details, through social media has become an incredibly precise science. “The way they can target is, I think, mind-blowing,” she said. “Like, some of these are one-to-one ads.”

Some ads and memes on social media were created not by the candidates, but by their supporters. For example, Taylor Swift posted a picture of herself as a “childless cat lady” in support of Kamala Harris; the post was then reposted and reshared. “You have people now that have access to creative tools that can put an AI version of Trump on a lion,” she noted.

So, both candidates are now using all their fans as ad agencies? “Yeah, I mean, that’s our competition out there!” Rolfe laughed.

Michael Waldman, president and CEO of the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice, said, “People make their own videos. People do memes. People make their own ads. That’s a good thing. That’s more participation. What’s a problem is when some very wealthy individual or interest puts tens of millions of dollars into these ads that are sometimes manipulative, and we don’t know they’re doing it.”

Spending on political ads this year has broken all records: about $16 billion, according to OpenSecrets. And Waldman’s concern is not knowing where all that money is coming from: “This is now a Wild West of front groups and hidden spenders reaching people on their phones, targeted very directly to somebody’s likes and dislikes,” he said.

In 2010 the Supreme Court handed down the Citizens United decision. That and subsequent cases removed all limits on what corporations and billionaires can spend on political campaigns. “It struck down a century of campaign finance law,” Waldman said. “Now, politicians know who’s giving; the donors know who’s giving. The only people who don’t know who’s giving is the taxpayers.”

He said there was legislation that came very close to enactment in the last Congress that would require the disclosure of who gave the money. “That would make a big difference,” Waldman said.

Could it happen? “Voters really care about this – Democrats, Independents, Republicans really care about it,” Waldman said. “When people get mad enough, when people get organized enough, throughout history, our country has acted to improve our political system, and it can happen again.”

The segmented messages, the ad targeting and the secret funding may all be new, but if you ask Tiffany Rolfe, some things will never change: “At the end of the day, it’s not just the policies or the product features. It really is, like, Is this person for me? Do I like this person? Do I believe them? And I think, no matter what, that will not change.”

As for Pennsylvania voter Jack Levis, there was one question left: Has he voted? “Mailing it today,” he replied. “So, it’s decided!”

      
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Story produced by Gabriel Falcon. Editor: Remington Korper.

     
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