CHANNEL-SURFING is no escape. During the past few weeks presidential campaigns have bought up virtually all the advertising on every television channel in Iowa, turning everything from “Sunday Night Football” to “The Big Bang Theory” into brief intermissions between rounds of political Wrestlemania. On January 29th, three days before the state’s first-in-the-nation caucus, a whopping 19 hours’ worth of election propaganda saturated its airwaves. By January 25th Iowa’s total ad bill had reached $53m; that figure is sure to climb once figures for the contest’s final days become available.
For all the talk of data-driven outreach and micro-targeted get-out-the-vote efforts, television advertising is still the staple on campaign shopping lists. In 2012 Barack Obama spent 54% of his general-election budget on non-digital paid media. Yet evidence that candidates are getting a meaningful return on this investment is notoriously hard to find. Study after study has shown that precious few voters are motivated or persuaded by advertising, or for that matter by campaigns in general—a finding political scientists have repeated so often it has...Continue reading
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