Here & Now

How Effective is Political Advertising?

Frederica Freyberg:

In addition to polls, another sure sign of a full-on election season is the onslaught of those negative ads.

Woman:

Tony Evers should have revoked the teacher’s license. But he didn’t.

Man:

Scott Walker does what’s best, for himself.

Man:

People should assume that it will go to Washington and become part of a system which is filled with career politicians.

Man:

Tell Tammy Baldwin it’s time to work for Wisconsin, not Washington liberals.

Frederica Freyberg:

Even the candidates say they don’t like them, but that doesn’t keep them from foisting attack ads onto the airwaves and online. So they work? If so, how do they work? We take those questions to UW-Madison Professor of Marketing Tom O’Guinn. Thanks for being here.

Tom O’Guinn:

My pleasure.

Frederica Freyberg:

So to that question, do these kinds of ads work?

Tom O’Guinn:

Well, the tougher question to ask, now, there was a period where people thought they worked pretty well and you certainly still see them. But I hate to hedge. It depends a lot on how they’re done. What’s more effective is framing people with an issue or even a word which could be positive or negative. But in the last say two, three election cycles, there’s been a belief that they’re just not being effective anymore and people are pulling back on them. I don’t think — generally I don’t think they’re that effective, no.

Frederica Freyberg:

And yet so why are they all over the airwaves?

Tom O’Guinn:

Were in a transition away from them. I think there’s still candidates who get convinced to use them. It is true that humans over-value negative information over positive. It’s just this human psychology we have. Something negative happens, we weight it more heavily than something that’s positive. But we’ve become sort of inured to them. They don’t seem to make much difference anymore. They’re seen as tacky. Some candidates have discovered there’s actually blowback from them. They backfire. People start feeling sorry for the person, so unfairly, in a shallow way, accused.

Frederica Freyberg:

Thats interesting because I was going to ask whether or not there’s a point at which saturation of these turns people off.

Tom O’Guinn:

They do. And there’s also the belief that political advertising generally, particularly television, has probably reached its zenith, is falling for all kinds of reasons. The competition for eyeballs with the internet and all sorts of other streaming video. But the typical 30-second political ad is becoming, I think on its way to being a little bit of a dinosaur.

Frederica Freyberg:

And so describe what the methods are now.

Tom O’Guinn:

Well, the methods — and they particularly came into the public eye mostly during the ’08 cycle, which is just micro-targeting through largely the internet, is that the ability to learn so much about individual voters through their browsing history, the scraping of their emails, through all the things we object to on privacy grounds, have become so good that you can target several, you know, million people with slightly different messages.

Frederica Freyberg:

And how do — describe exactly what that is. Is that a Facebook ad while you’re browsing around Facebook? Or is it an email? Or is it a tweet?

Tom O’Guinn:

Its usually all of those things. The ability once you’re identified — let’s say they identify you as somebody who’s still neutral, which is a small percentage of the electorate, right? We already know how most people are going to vote. So if they identify you as still having a good potential to be convinced, they’re going to hit you with everything they can. If you’re a big Facebook user, they’re going to show up on Facebook. And they’re also going to try to — you give these companies permission to scrape your email, to scrape all information, so they’re going to try to find out what are the issues that you’ve said to your friends are important to you and then have someone who’s similar to you or appears similar to you say something that you’ve actually already said.

Frederica Freyberg:

And so how much more effective or how effective are those methods than throwing it up on the TV airwaves or these, talk about dinosaurs, all of these come in your mailbox.

Tom O’Guinn:

And go immediately into my trash. I don’t even read them. Theyre a lot more effective, at least for now. On a dollar basis, which everybody cares about, they are so much more cost effective and they appear to be speaking directly to you rather than an ad just blaring at 20 million people. Almost everyone I know who does this kind of work believes that it — highly targeted internet advertising is how it’s working. It’s often presented as news. It’s often presented as an opinion piece. It may not look like a political ad at all.

Frederica Freyberg:

Always having to be careful, as we know, about that kind of thing. Professor O’Guinn, thanks very much.

Tom O’Guinn:

Oh, my pleasure.