Political Advertising in the United States

Erika Franklin Fowler, Michael M. Franz, Travis N. Ridout, Michael Franz, Travis Ridout

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000468090
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Advertising
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Political Advertising in the United States examines the volume, distribution, content, and effects of political advertising in congressional and presidential elections. The book considers the role of television ads using extensive data on ad airings on local broadcast stations. It also analyzes newly available data on paid digital ads, including ads on Facebook, Instagram, Google, and YouTube. The book covers the role of outside groups in airing ads, including the rise of dark money groups and gaps in existing federal campaign finance laws around transparency of outside group spending. The authors consider how ad sponsors design and target ads. They also review the positive and negative implications of an electoral system where billions are spent on paid advertising. With detailed analysis of presidential and congressional campaign ads and discussion questions in each chapter, this accessibly written book is a must-read for students, scholars, and practitioners who want to understand the ins and outs of political advertising.

New to the Second Edition

• Covers the spending, content, and tone of political advertising in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections and the 2018 midterms, looking ahead to 2022 and 2024.

• Addresses the interference of foreign actors in elections and their connection to political advertising.

• Expands the discussion of digital political advertising and incorporates this topic into every chapter.

• Adds a new chapter specifically addressing digital ad content and spending.

• Includes data from the Facebook, Google, and Snapchat ad libraries and explores the role of these companies in regulating the sale of political advertising.

• Incorporates new data on the effects of race and gender in advertising, including what is known about the way in which advertising may activate prejudicial attitudes.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781003165712-1

Pretend for the moment that it is October 30, 2020, just a few days before Election Day, and you are living in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Over breakfast you take out your phone and open some of your social media apps. As you scroll through your feed, you are bombarded by ads from the campaigns of Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Wanting a break from politics, you decide to turn on some mindless television, specifically, the celebrity gossip program Access Daily on Channel 13, Grand Rapids’ ABC affiliate. At 9:30 a.m., an ad from the campaign of Democrat Gary Peters, a U.S. Senate candidate, comes on the screen. This is followed immediately by an ad from Better Future Michigan Fund, a Super PAC, promoting Senate candidate John James, the Republican opponent of Gary Peters. The next ad is one sponsored by Joe Biden. The program resumes, but at 9:49 a.m., an ad paid for jointly by the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee appears. This ad is followed immediately by one sponsored by a group called House Majority PAC attacking Republican Peter Meijer, a candidate for Michigan’s 3rd congressional district seat. The entertainment news on Access Daily resumes, but at 9:55 a.m. there is another Joe Biden ad, which is followed thirty seconds later by an ad paid for by the campaign of John James. An ad paid for by the Trump campaign is up next. Two minutes later, an ad from John James and the National Republican Senatorial Committee airs. Right after it is an ad from the Biden campaign, and at 9:59 a.m., another from the Better Future Michigan Fund. After just thirty minutes of watching television you’ve already seen five and a half minutes’ worth of political ads. That’s as much, if not more, politics as you would have seen had you watched the local news for half an hour. And imagine if you had watched Channel 13 all day long. You would have seen three hundred and twenty televised political ads, for a grand total of two hours and forty-five minutes’ worth of campaign messages in one day! And that does not count the ads in your Facebook or Instagram feeds, nor the ads you encounter when you watched videos on YouTube or searched Google for more information about Peter Meijer, whom you had not heard about previously.

Those thirty minutes of television in Grand Rapids combined with the prevalence of additional activity online, help to illustrate some important points about political advertising. The first is the ubiquity of political advertising close to an election. Grand Rapids is a fairly typical media market, a region in which the population receives the same television and radio station signals. One thousand four hundred sixty-three political ads for presidential, Senate, or House candidates aired on Grand Rapids’ five broadcast television stations on October 30, and residents received countless ads through digital and social media channels (for example, spending by the Biden and Trump campaigns on Facebook and Instagram in Michigan that week totaled over $2.8 million). But Grand Rapids was not even the top media market that day in terms of the number of ads aired. In fact, Grand Rapids was number six.

Let’s look at the period between January 1, 2020, and Election Day, November 3, and expand our scope from Grand Rapids to all 210 media markets in the United States. Table 1.1 shows the number of television ad airings (sometimes called spots) on broadcast television, national network television, and national cable television in three different types of races. In races for the US House, over 1.31 million spots aired across the country, at an estimated cost of $664 million. For the Senate, it was 2.26 million spots at a cost of $1.19 billion. Advertising was even more intense in the presidential race, with 2.05 million spots aired at an estimated cost of $1.44 billion. All told, 5.62 million spots were aired in federal races in 2020, at a cost of $3.29 billion. If you add in spots aired on behalf of candidates for governor, state representative, country coroner, and other elected positions (our data include any ad for elected office that aired on local broadcast stations), the cost of all spots aired in 2020 reaches $3.54 billion, accounting for about 6.33 million airings.

Table 1.1 Ads Aired in Federal Races in 2020 and Estimated Costs

	Number of Spots	Est. Cost
President	2,046,259	$1,437,614,120
House	1,313,241	$663,559,240
Senate	2,259,545	$1,189,279,520
Total	5,619,045	$3,290,452,880

Source: Data from the Wesleyan Media Project.

Second, the Grand Rapids example also illustrates the diversity of advertising sponsors. There were ads paid for by the candidates’ campaigns, the political parties, and a variety of outside groups, including Super PACs such as House Majority PAC and Better Michigan Fund. Other groups, such as 501c organizations, were active in many other campaigns across the country. These groups are defined in the tax code as non-profits, which allows them to raise unlimited amounts of money from individual donors and spend that money on ads, and they are not required to disclose publicly the names of their donors. Super PACs can also raise and spend unlimited amounts, but they must make public all expenditures and donors.

Up until the late 1990s, the candidates’ official campaigns paid for most of the ads aired on their behalf, but that is no longer the case in many races. To give just one example, in the Iowa Senate race in 2020, outside groups collectively aired more advertisements attacking or promoting candidates than did the candidates themselves. As a result of this movement toward outside group advertisers, some wonder: Do campaigns control their own messages, or are they at the mercy of big-dollar groups with agendas of their own?

Third, the Grand Rapids example looks at ads aired during Access Daily to highlight the fact that political advertising isn’t shown only during political programs (such as political talk shows or twenty-four-hour news channels). On the contrary, campaigns frequently place advertisements on nonpolitical television shows and on social media platforms to reach key audiences that are not predisposed to pay much attention to public affairs. Although people have lots of programming choices when they turn on their television sets, they have a hard time avoiding political advertisements no matter what they watch—especially in markets with competitive races—due the sheer volume of ads on the airwaves. Furthermore, campaigns are becoming increasingly sophisticated at targeting advertising messages to the types of audiences they believe are tuning in to particular programs.

Why Study Political Advertising?

Political advertising is the primary way candidates attempt to reach voters and thus is the most visible part of the campaign for many voters. Certainly there are other ways campaigns try to communicate with voters, but advertising continues to comprise the largest share of many campaign budgets. Thus, understanding political campaigns requires understanding how political advertising is created and deployed, and how developments in technology and the regulatory environment have shaped campaigns’ choices and their ability to speak directly to voters. Of course, all of these decisions and changes have implications for how advertising influences the electorate. For these reasons, any in-depth examination of modern political campaigning must include an understanding of the creation, strategic deployment, and influence of political advertising.

Four Key Arguments

In this book, we will advance four main arguments about political advertising.

1 The regulatory environment has had a huge impact on the sponsorship and content of political ads

Since 2007, there has been a string of US Supreme Court rulings and rule changes by the Federal Election Commission (FEC), the government agency that regulates the financing of federal campaigns, that have had a major impact on how easy it is for an outside group to become involved in a political advertising campaign. In brief, these changes in the regulatory environment have eased the way for outside groups to raise money for advertising and for these groups to expressly endorse a candidate. Any ad sponsor can now urge viewers to “Vote for Donald Trump” or “Vote for Joe Biden.” In the past, interest groups hoping to be this explicit had to raise their money in highly regulated ways. Chapter 2 provides the details of these changes, but one important result is the increased presence of big-money donors funding big-money interest groups.

2 “Big data” has led to increasingly sophisticated ad targeting

In the 2004 campaign, the Republican Party began placing their advertisements on certain television programs in order to get more bang for their buck. They knew, based on massive consumer surveys, which programs Democrats, Republicans, and persuadable voters watched, and they knew whether the audience of each program was likely or unlikely to vote. For example, if you want to speak to Democrats who are almost certain to vote, you should advertise during daytime or late-night talk shows. The audience for music videos is also heavily Democratic, but it contains a lot of people who are unlikely to vote. If you want to find a lot of Republican voters, then advertising during sports is an extremely good bet.¹ The audiences for programs such as Young Sheldon, NCIS, and Blue Bloods all skew Republican, while those for programs such as Schitt’s Creek, Saturday Night Live, and Bob’s Burgers are highly Democratic.^2,3 More recently, campaigns have started using data on people’s television viewing habits obtained from cable set-top boxes. These data on household viewing habits have been matched to databases containing information on millions of consumers, which allows campaigns to reach very specific categories of voters with their messages. And digital advertising is now targeted based on a viewer’s geographical location, demographic characteristics, and personal interests. Chapter 6 provides much more detail on how this targeting takes place.

3 Recent technological advances have increased the efficiency of ad distribution

Traditionally, campaigns could place their ads on national and local broadcast television. Local television has the advantage of allowing campaigns to target their messages geographically. But now cable television allows campaigns to reach niche audiences across multiple markets, such as highly knowledgeable Republicans watching Fox News, women watching Lifetime or Hallmark Channel, or parents watching Nick Jr. with their children. Moreover, the recent growth of cable interconnects—groups of local cable television systems that are linked together—allows cable companies to easily insert ads between programs, and those ads can be targeted to certain cities or even neighborhoods. This helps campaigns to spend their money efficiently; they don’t waste money on ads that will be seen by people who live outside the electoral district or who are unlikely to support the candidate. Lastly, campaigns now have the capacity to buy online ads (including ads on social media platforms or through streaming on-demand platforms) that appear only in certain geographic locations or on websites where they are likely to reach a receptive audience. These ads can also be highly targeted to individual traits and interests. Chapter 6 discusses how these technological changes have made advertising more efficient.

4 All of these developments have influenced the persuasive impact of ads

The increase in dollars going to advertising as a result of the new regulatory environment means that people are seeing more ads than ever before. But more important for gauging the impact of advertising on who wins an election is that, thanks to better ad targeting and distribution, voters are increasingly being exposed to unbalanced message flows. It is no longer the case that for each Republican ad you see, you also see one Democratic ad. If someone decides to anonymously back the Democratic candidate through a $10 million dollar donation to a group supporting that candidate, then you may see four Democratic ads for each Republican ad. And depending on the television stations and programs you watch and how efficient targeting algorithms are online, you may see eight Democratic ads for each Republican ad due to that targeting. Increasingly common unbalanced message flows like these raise the possibility that voter persuasion and mobilization could be more likely. Chapter 7 examines the role of advertising in persuading people to vote in a certain way.

History of Campaign Advertising

Before we delve deeper into the issues we note earlier, let’s take a quick look at the history of campaign ads in the US for some context of what has and hasn’t changed in the political advertising landscape. Televised political advertising has been around for over seventy years. Scholars believe that the first campaign ad in the United States was aired in 1950 by Senator William Benton of Connecticut, who had a career as an ad executive. The first presidential campaign ads appeared on American televisions in 1952, a year in which about a third of American households had televisions.⁴ This series of ads, each of which was twenty seconds in length, was aired by Dwight Eisenhower’s presidential campaign. Each featured an ordinary voter asking Eisenhower a question and Eisenhower’s quick response. Production value was low: there was no music, and both the citizen and Eisenhower were seen in front of a grey background. That same year, Eisenhower also ran an ad with cartoon animation showin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Regulation of Advertising
• 3 The Volume and Content of Political Advertising on Television
• 4 The Challenge of Online Advertising
• 5 How Ads Are Created and Tested
• 6 Buying and Targeting Political Advertising
• 7 Studying the Persuasive Effects of Advertising
• 8 Beyond Persuasion: Mobilization and Other Effects of Advertising
• 9 The Future of Political Advertising and Its Role in Our Society
• Glossary
• Index