Journal article
Separation by Television Program: Understanding the Targeting of Political Advertising in Presidential Elections
Political communication, Vol.29(1), pp.1-23
01/01/2012
Handle:
https://hdl.handle.net/2376/104082
Abstract
Although conventional wisdom suggests that imbalanced message flows are relatively rare in presidential campaigns, this view relies on the assumption that competing campaigns allocate their advertising similarly. In this research, we show that this assumption is false. We combine ad tracking data from the Wisconsin Advertising Project with a unique collection of survey data on the audience for various program genres. Examining advertising in the 2000, 2004, and 2008 U.S. presidential races, we find that the Republican and Democratic candidates distributed their advertising differently across different program genres, reaching different types of voters. A form of microtargeting has increasingly entered into the realm of political advertising buys. We find that who sees certain political ads is more nonrandom than scholars had previously thought, and we find that unbalanced message flows (a precondition for ad persuasion) are more prevalent than conventional wisdom has suggested.
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Details
- Title
- Separation by Television Program: Understanding the Targeting of Political Advertising in Presidential Elections
- Creators
- Travis N Ridout - Department of Political Science , Washington State UniversityMichael Franz - Department of Government and Legal Studies , Bowdoin CollegeKenneth M Goldstein - Department of Political Science , University of Wisconsin-MadisonWilliam J Feltus - National Media Research, Planning and Placement LLC
- Publication Details
- Political communication, Vol.29(1), pp.1-23
- Academic Unit
- Politics, Philosophy and Public Affairs, School of
- Publisher
- Taylor & Francis Group
- Identifiers
- 99900546876801842
- Language
- English
- Resource Type
- Journal article