Political Advertising
The Appeal of Television and Web Campaigning
There are four basic political messages in advertisements: positive messages to promote the individual, negative messages to attack the opponent, comparative messages designed to attack, and response messages to answer the opponents attack. Campaign advertising offers a vehicle to fulfill these main functions. Television advertisements and campaign web sites fulfill these roles in similar ways.
Candidate-Centered Media Control
Candidates benefit from TV and web advertising because they can control the message that is seen by a multitude of people. Additionally in comparison to other forms of media, TV ads and web sites promotions (hereafter referred to as TV/WEB) are more efficient and less costly and time consuming that face-to-face comparison.
TV/WEB provides an appealing prospect for candidates for several reasons. First, political advertising provides a concentrated message, allowing candidates to target certain demographics. TV advertising allows candidates multiple controls over the delivery of a message. Not only does the candidate choose the content of the message, they choose the demographic that views it. Candidates can strategize and break down the population into race, age, religion, and education. The segmentation of the voters allows candidates to increase the effectiveness of their message. African Americans are most often concerned with social programs and issues of social justice. Thus candidates can target Black Entertainment Television in order to spread awareness of their social policies and increase the name recognition within this subset of the population. Similarly, candidates may target MTV to increase their base among young people or the Women’s Entertainment (WE) channel for reproductive health issues. The element of control in selecting TV ad slots offers an appealing opportunity to gain support from large voting blocks.
Increasing Issue and Candidate Awareness
Campaign websites and use of the internet can achieve a similar goal. Candidates and avid supporters can link the campaign website with a candidate’s concise messages to special interest blogs, chat rooms, or purchase ad banner space on special interest website. The campaign website primarily serves three of the five functions of political communication: issue development/exploration, attacking the opposition, and defense.
On the first of these functions, campaign websites allow the candidate to provide detailed analysis on domestic and foreign policy initiatives free of critique from the opposition. This allows candidates to explore and convince their viewers of their policy objectives. At the same time, candidates may use RSS feeds, social networking updates, or even a blog on the campaign website to defend themselves from previous opposition attacks. While campaign websites may be confined initially to a single domain, the ease of copying and pasting the information into targeted demographic sites makes campaign websites an attractive proposition for candidates.
Improving Name Recognition
TV advertisements and campaign websites can work in tandem with one another. Generally, an average citizen must know the name of the politician before they search for the candidate’s webpage. Despite the detailed information provided in a webpage-much more information than the average 30 second television ad-individuals are simply unlikely to seek out a campaign webpage unless the candidate has some level of name recognition.
Television ads, on the other hand, increase name recognition which can encourage individuals to seek out additional information from alternative sources, i.e. the internet. Both elements work together to create a cohesive candidate image which is key to generating a honest, credible image.
Together these methods are considerably easier to disburse messages and garner support from large audiences, a significant advantage in comparison to face to face campaigning.
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