10 Questions for Tim Groeling on the power of political ads

 

 

 

We’ve been deluged because of California’s very competitive governor’s and Senate races. For the first time in recent memory, California is feeling what it’s like to be a battleground state. In a close race — and close races are happening across the country this election cycle — anyone who can potentially sway the outcome will try to do it with advertising. By one estimate, Carly Fiorina (running for U.S. Senate) is spending $2 million a week on advertising, and (Sen.) Barbara Boxer has been matching her. The governor’s race — Jerry Brown vs. Meg Whitman — has been similarly expensive. Nationwide, political ad spending has almost doubled, from an estimated $4.2 billion in this campaign cycle compared to $2.6 billion in 2008.

 

Television is still America’s main source for political communication, but it’s rapidly losing its dominance to online communication. A Pew Research Center survey this year asked people where they get most of their national and international news: 68 percent said they watch TV news, down from 82 percent in 1999; 41 percent get their news from the Internet, compared to 6 percent in 1999, and also surpassing the 24 percent of people who rely on newspapers.

 

Another shift is that many more people are watching cable than network news. Cable and the Internet tend to be a lot more partisan, which I think is one of the reasons we’re seeing politics becoming increasingly polarized.

 

Campaigns want to fire up the party base and make sure they get out and vote. Candidates also want to reach people who they think are persuadable — the “undecideds” whose vote they hope they can sway one way or the other. The Democratic brand has taken a beating nationally with the recession dragging on and the White House and Congress seen as responsible for this and other arguable failures. In California, which is disproportionately Democratic, a lot of people who voted for Obama are not necessarily happy with that choice and may vote for the other side. California independents basically are up for grabs; they’ve been breaking towards Republicans in a way that is unusual.

 

TV is fundamentally a very emotional medium, very well-suited for communicating emotional information very quickly with the right audiovisual combination of words, music and images. While emotion is dismissed by some as being inferior and unrelated to reason, recent research suggests that the effective use of emotion in political advertising can actually help improve viewers’ reasoning processes and information retention.

 

Increasingly, we tune TV ads out. As attentive as I am to political campaigns and advertisements, I have this little button on my DVR that allows me to skip forward past commercials — and I often use it. Compare this to the glory days of TV advertising where you would have what we would consider truly awful commercials that were effective because people basically were held hostage. You were limited to three networks, and if you wanted to change to another channel, you would have to get up and do it manually — there was no remote control. Now we can escape. We can fast-forward, go online or purchase TV programs on DVD.

 

The biggest limitation of TV is the standard length of an ad: 30 seconds. It’s extremely difficult to communicate a lot of information or put together a reasoned argument in 30 seconds. For students in my class learning to produce TV political ads of their own, the 30-second limitation is shocking. They’ll do storyboards laying out a proposal for their commercial — telling you all about the candidate, making impossibly long arguments. The content of campaign ads has to both grab people’s attention and fit into a very small container — so small that you can’t really develop any of the logic behind it.

 

The choice of whether to go negative is pretty strategic, depending on the particular campaign. The fact that the governor’s and Senate races are very close has dictated a high level of negativity. The person who is trailing is more likely to go negative, having less to lose. Interestingly, a recent study shows that negative ads compared to positive ads tend to contain more empirical evidence. Their threatening tones inspire a fearful state and, the study suggests, make people more willing to challenge their existing assumptions and accept new information, especially if it’s new and well-researched.

 

One negative ad that jumped out for me in this campaign and got a big following online was the “Demon Sheep” ad in Carly Fiorina’s primary race against Tom Campbell. Another one was the Meg Whitman ad which dug up footage of Bill Clinton criticizing Jerry Brown. Using an opponent’s own words against him, or his party’s words against him, is a very effective strategy. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if that’s what inspired Bill Clinton to give that speech on campus (on Oct. 15, at a Democratic Party-sponsored rally), to try to do a little damage control. It’s the negative ads that people tend to remember.

 

Positive ads try to build up enthusiasm among supporters. Rather than convey new information, they focus more on things like personal character, the candidate’s record of accomplishments and future proposals. Using emotional music and stirring visuals, they want to make people feel happy and satisfied and create a feeling of attachment to the candidate. There’s not much variation between positive ads, and they’re often not very memorable. One positive ad that was particularly memorable and effective was “The Man from Hope,” the long Clinton bio from the 1992 campaign.

 

 

I don’t think so. Classics don’t come along very often. They aren’t always necessarily the good ones but the ones that seem to have had the most impact on the campaign. The Swiftboat ads against John Kerry in the 2004 presidential race had an arguable impact. Kerry basically made his Vietnam War service record the showcase at the Democratic National Convention. Then this massive ad campaign (by a group of veterans countering his campaign claims) undercut his entire message in a way that was devastating.

 

Certain ads are so effective they’ve been doing versions of them for decades. For instance, there was the 2008 presidential primary ad showing a phone ringing in the White House at 3 a.m. and asking voters, “Who do you want answering the phone — Hilary Clinton or Barack Obama?” Variants of that commercial have been used since the 1960s. In 1984, Walter Mondale used it against Gary Hart. Similarly, Jerry Brown’s “Pinocchio” ad accusing Meg Whitman of lying by showing her nose growing longer — that ad concept has been used again and again, just plugging in different candidates’ names.

 

I tend to be very cautious about certain things in ads. One of them is the portrayal of a candidate on a single, isolated vote; in Congress, the legislative process is so complicated, often involving a series of small votes rather than one single vote that determines when a bill becomes law. Also suspicious are flip-flop ads that show a candidate saying first one thing and then its opposite; these ads will often use a quote edited from its larger context. I also tend to discount endorsements by groups that claim to represent entire segments of the population but who really might not.

 

As far as I can tell, Boxer and Brown are probably going to win — but it’s close. They’re both legitimately still in contention, and until someone gets something like a 10-point lead, they are going to continue to sink advertising money into it to try to change the outcome. But competitive races like these are important. Having too many incumbents cruise to election unchallenged is not healthy for a democracy. So I don’t mind if people get dragged through the mud a little bit… as long as it’s not me.