by B. J. Carter
Coastal Journal staff

It has been estimated that more than three million political ads were televised leading up to the elections of 2004. More than $800 million was spent on TV ads in the race for the White House alone, and presidential candidates, along with their party and interest group allies, broadcast more than a million ads —twice the number aired before the 2000 elections.  Convential wisdom suggests that the constant barage of political advertising is a big turn-off for voters, so much so that they may be disinclined to participate in elections at all. 

But with their new book Campaign Advertising and American Democracy, Bowdoin professor Michael Franz and his co-authors found otherwise.  The results may surprise you.

Your new book is about the effectiveness of political advertising.  Would you mind going into a little more detail about your findings?

Sure.  I’ll start with what the book is not, just to clarify.  It’s not a book about whether ads convince voters to vote for certain candidates.  That’s a totally a different question.  The questions we were interested in were  how do ads affect people’s knowledge of the candidates, interest in the candidates, and their likeliness of participating.  These are all things candidates presumably care about but are not necessarily concerned with.  Conventional wisdom says ads have a negative effect on voters, so that’s how we start the book, laying out all the different arguments about negative ads turning people off to politics.  What we found was that, to the extent that ads do have an impact - and it’s not a very large one - it is a positive one.  Overall, the most powerful impact they have is educating voters.  The more ads you see, the more likely you are to recall facts about that candidates.

The next level of effect is that they have a modest impact on people’s interest in elections.  The weakest effect, though it’s still there, is an increase in participation.  The analogy we use in the book is that ads are like multivitamins.  It’s best to eat fruits and vegetables to get all your minerals everyday, but we usually don’t.  Instead, we take a multivitamin as a supplement.  Is it the best thing to do?  No.  Will it hurt you?  No, but you wouldn’t want to live on them, either.  That’s what political advertising is like.  It’s not the real thing when it comes to educating people about the issues and the candidates, but it doesn’t hurt.

How were your results collected?

One of the values of this piece of research is that we were able to use a set of data that comes from University of Wisconsin that collects every single political ad that aired in the top 100 media markets.  Anytime an ad airs in one of these top media markets, this software technology can capture the ad.  We get all the ads that are out there.  In 2000, there were about a million spots aired, in 2004 there were about a million and a half aired.  We have all the ads aired, and then we get the unique ad itself and how many times it aired.  We can then connect those sets of data to surveys polling voters, knowing exactly which media market they were in and therefore which ads they were exposed to.  The benefit is that it’s real world data and real world advertising patterns.  Most research in this realm would involve experiments, where you bring people in and show them ads and measure their responses.  That’s great, but it doesn’t necessarily translate in the real world.  This research looks at real world voters exposed to real world ads.

You were looking at national elections?

Yeah, the election in 2004.

Can you extrapolate to local politics and local advertising?

Right.  To the extent that ads have an effect on the local level, we would expect that it would be greater than what we found nationally.  That’s because people need more information on the local level, whereas the higher up you go, the more information is available in more places.  So in the presidential elections, you can get information everywhere on the candidates and the issues.  It’s hard to avoid, actually [laughs].  But in a local election, you could easily miss the real issues and debates, so ads might have a larger impact.

And people are more apt to go looking for information.

Right, like the five ballot referendums recently.  Citizens just going about their daily routine might not know where to go to get information about those ballot issues, and they might not get covered in the media until the very end.  But there are lots of ads in Maine on those issues, so if you’re watching Jeopardy or something, when ads typically run, you’re getting exposed to information you’re not getting anywhere else.  On the presidential level, your friends, family, blogs, the news are all talking about it, so you already have a lot information.

If the effect of the ads are not harmful but at best marginally educational, why is so much money spent on advertising?  We’re talking about a ton of money.

Well, the perception is that there’s a ton of money spent on political advertising, but if you look at it compared to other kinds of advertising, the aggregate number would be significantly lower.  For example, advertising for toothpaste probably costs two to three times as much as political advertising, so it’s not as much as we might think.  That said, there are a lot of ads out there.  If you’re in Iowa right now, every other commercial is an ad.  Why are candidates doing this?  Part of the reason is that they know that even if they themselves are not on the air, the other candidates are.  If there’s an imbalance of information available for voters to consume, that isn’t good.   By spending 7$ million dollars in Iowa, as Romney has done, you’re trying to minimize the impact your opponents are having, even if that impact is small.  If you weren’t, you’d get blown away.  So these candidates are spending the money on ads just to keep up with their opponents.  The problem with that, though, is that by putting so many ads out there, the candidates might cancel each other out.

The idea that you have to advertise a political candidate as you might a product like toothpaste is a little strange in itself, but then again candidates are certainly scrutinized more heavily than your average brand of toothpaste.

That’s right, the consequences of choosing a candidate are a little more substantial.

What was it like working with the co-authors of the book?  How did you guys come to collaborate?

The three of us were all at the University of Wisconsin, we were graduate students.  We started collaborating in 2001, 2002.  Paul Freedman is a close friend who teaches at the University of Virginia.  All four of us have been publishing for a number of years on advertising and its impact.  Some of this stuff we’d already published seperately, but we started talking over dinners and decided it would be good if it was all published in one place so we could make the case for our empirical approach.  It came together pretty organically from there.  And we do things that other people haven’t done.  For example, there’s a chapter on how ads affect people’s likelihood of voting, and we found that while it does have a small impact on voter turnout, it has absolutely no effect on other forms of particiaption like how often you talk about politics with your friends, join a campaign, or even put a sign on your lawn.  It really only galvanizes people to act on Election Day.  We didn’t know that before.

Did you guys plan the book’s release for the current campaign season?

I think so.  As people start talking about the campaigns in general, this is a great time to jump in.  There’s going to be so much discussion about campaign ads in the next year that we wanted to make a contribution to that discussion.  Like I said, conventional wisdom suggests that ads turn people off, and we’re really passionate about telling people otherwise.   We’ve been working on this for awhile, but having it come out now was sort of the idea. 

Were you able to parse out the factors that do contribute to this perception that political ads impact people negatively?

In general, there’s a gut-check aversion to negativity in America.  People have been saying for years that each election is more negative than the previous one or that they hate negative ads, and I think that’s because people wish for a better level of dialogue in this country.  But as I say to my students, if we were to have nothing but positive issue debates and candidates went on TV every week and debated the issues dispassionately, nobody would listen.  So people like saying they wish the campaigns behaved differently, but at the end of the day we really like the drama.  Our goal was to see if what people were saying translated to the actual effects of the ads.

What’s the media’s role in the effectiveness of these ads?  If you watch the cable news networks, they monitor the campaigns very closely and take all these polls and make direct correlations between the results and any so-called “negative” ads.  They’re already doing this with Hillary Clinton, cautioning her against going too negative.  Do you think that the media has actually clouded this issue?

I think so.  Often times, the pundits that get interviewed are not political scientists.  They’re commentators, former campaign managers or organizers, so they’re pretty knowledgeable, but they don’t necessarily know the impact of the ads.  They just make gut-check observations about what the ads are really doing.  The media has a tendency to interview people who think negative ads will impact voters negatively.  Secondly, there’s some research out there that suggests that when the media does in fact cover political ads, it only covers the negative or sensational ones.  That’s interesting because, from the voters’ perspective, the race might seem more negative than it actually is due to the media coverage of negative ads. 

But isn’t the perception of the campaigns all there really is?  Isn’t that what people reflect on in the booth?

It is.  But the perception comes from everything that voters are exposed to.  Our research was more interested in whether or not exposure to campaign ads specifically, isolating all other factors, has an impact.  Ballot-box decision-making is a different question.

Let’s talk about the future of political advertising.  YouTube seems to be having a large effect on the kind of information available to voters instantaneously.  Do you think the changes in technology and media broadcast will make political ads obsolete?  Or do you think politicians will continue to find a way to inject them into internet culture?

Even though internet advertising will continue to grow in the next, say, fifteen years, it won’t surpass television advertising.  TV is still a dominant part of daily American life.  If TV broadcasts were subsumed by the internet, then maybe politicians would have to rethink it.  But even with the dramatic rise of the internet in the last ten years, there were more TV ads in the last election than the election before it.  There’s been no plateau.  Yet.  One of the great things about internet advertising, however, is that it’s so cheap.  If you want to create a website, you can do that for free.  If you want to create an ad and put it up on your candidates website, you can do that for free, there’s no cost associated.  More and more candidates will start to think that way.  But the threshhold isn’t there yet.  After all, the only people to see Hillary’s website are Hillary supporters.  If she can advertise during TV shows whose audience is not typically supportive of her, maybe she can win a few more votes.

Did you guys find radio advertising to continue to be a factor?

We don’t have advertising data for radio ads, actually.  That’s pretty unchartered territory for scholarship on this question.  No one has really looked at the impact of radio ads.  But they are influential.  They have to be.  They’re dominant, they’re frequent, and they’re a little cheaper than TV ads.  Nobody’s really studied that yet, though [laughs].  It’s a little tougher to get the data.  You could use the experimental method, I’m just not sure how much that actually tells you. 

I imagine the research is still ongoing?

Oh yeah.

Where are you now?

We’re taking the next step to ask what role these ads play in the ballot box.  Do ads that make you scared have more of an impact than ads that come across as optimistic and enthusiastic, for example.

Alright, sounds good.