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The researchers were surprised by the results, and the campaign consultants were floored: The ads bumped Perry’s numbers by a muscular 5 percentage points, but the effect only lasted a week, according to a study published in the February issue of the American Political Science Review.ĭefenders of campaign advertising point out that the test only considered a positive ad with a short run in an as-yet-uncontested primary. Before, during and after the advertisement’s twoweek run, pollsters called voters in each of those media markets and asked them, if the election were held that day, whether they’d vote for Perry or Carole Keeton Strayhorn, Perry’s likely primary opponent.
SUBLIMINAL MESSAGES IN ADVERTISING PSYCHOLOGY TV
To investigate advertising’s effect, Green and his colleagues randomly assigned a “get to know the candidate” radio and TV spot to 18 media markets. The Perry campaign expected a short, intense primary battle, and Carney wanted to pre-emptively deploy $2 million in positive advertising to shore up Perry’s base. The only catch: The researchers couldn’t publish their results until after the election.
SUBLIMINAL MESSAGES IN ADVERTISING PSYCHOLOGY SERIES
Carney offered Green and his colleagues the opportunity to use their campaign budget to conduct a series of unprecedented experiments - randomly assigning television and radio ads to different markets to see what worked, for instance.
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“The next thing you know, there we were in Austin,” recalls Green. Carney, who was running Perry’s gubernatorial re-election campaign, called Green and invited him to test his theories on a major campaign. That changed, however, when Republican consultant Dave Carney read “Get Out the Vote,” a 2004 book by Green that detailed his research showing TV ads don’t get nearly as many people to the polls as goodold door knocking does. “But they give us good ideas, too - conservatives have been much better at making use of emotional tools in their campaigns than liberals.” When do ads matter?īefore 2005, no major campaign had made use of science’s best tool: randomized controlled trials. “It’s funny that a bunch of liberal academics have given conservative campaigns so much to work with,” says David Pizarro, PhD, a political psychology professor at Cornell.
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In the meantime, psychologists and political scientists are studying campaign ads and coming up with surprising results - finding, for example, that negative ads might create more thoughtful voters than positive ones, and that reminders of children or contagion can push otherwise liberal voters to endorse more conservative views. “Both sides are looking for an edge, and more rigorous science leads to more efficient campaigning,” he says. “Consultants obviously have good intuition, especially if they are experienced, and some of them even pay attention to the psychology and political science literature, but I think they are the minority,” says Ted Brader, PhD, a political psychology professor at the University of Michigan.īut increasingly, smart campaign consultants are reading studies and even collaborating with researchers, says Donald Green, PhD, a political science professor at Columbia University who collaborated with the 2006 Rick Perry gubernatorial campaign in Texas to conduct groundbreaking studies of political advertising. However, they rarely pay attention to burgeoning research by psychologists and other social scientists who are exploring whether the images and emotions evoked by campaign ads actually sway voters, researchers say. With this much money on the line, you might assume that media consultants know what works and what doesn’t. Campaigns will spend upward of $3 billion on broadcast television ads for the 2012 presidential, congressional and gubernatorial elections, a record-breaking amount, according to Moody’s Investment Services. Tired of political ads? The positive ones with unfurling flags and smiling children? The negative ones with grainy images of opponents? Well, gird yourself.