Advertising

Subterms

    Latest story

    188 Shares189 Views

    Want to come up with a winning election ad campaign? Just be honest | Torsten Bell

    by

    There are so many elections this year but how to go about winning them? Labour has a sub-optimal, but impressively consistent strategy: waiting (usually a decade and a half in opposition).It’s paying off again with huge swings to them in last week’s two byelections. But this approach requires patience and most parties around the world are less keen on waiting that long. So they spend a lot of time and money trying to win, which means election adverts. In the US, TV ads are centre stage. In the UK, those are largely banned (even GB News is meant to be providing news when Tory MPs interview each other) but online ads are big business.Those involved in politics have very strong views about the kind of ads that work. They absolutely have to be positive about your offer. Or negative about your ghastly opponent. It’s imperative they’re about issues, not personalities. Or the opposite. The only problem with those election gurus’ certainties? Different kinds of ads work at different times and places. So found research with access to an intriguing data source: experiments conducted by campaign teams during 2018 and 2020 US elections to test ad options before choosing which to air; 617 ads were tested in 146 survey experiments.Researchers showed that quality matters – it’s not unusual for an advert to be 50% more or less persuasive than average. But one kind is not generally more persuasive and the type of ads that worked in 2018 didn’t have the same effect in 2020.So, if you’re trying to get yourself elected, my advice is to base your campaign on the evidence, not just your hunch. See it as good practice. After all, we’d ideally run the country that way. More

    More stories

    • 125 Shares179 Views

      in US Politics

      Record $15.9bn in US political ad spending expected for 2024

      by

      With little more than a month to go before the US presidential election season kicks off in Iowa, a new projection of political spending says a record $15.9bn will be spent on advertising, up more than 30% up on the 2019-2020 election cycle.The assessment, by GroupM, one of the world’s largest paid advertising agencies, suggests total political ad revenue could add a billion more to reach a total of $17.1bn, if including direct mail pitches.Despite voters already knowing the likely two nominees – Joe Biden and Donald Trump – depriving the two main parties of traditional meet-our-candidate introduction spending, the extraordinary spend on political advertising next year is now so large that it will be the 10th largest singular ad market in the world – larger than all of Australia’s.The projected ad spending totals in the presidential election year will also be five times higher than the $3.6bn spent on political and issue ads during the last midterm elections. By the 2028 presidential election, the group said, political ad spending could reach $20bn.According to the GroupM survey, obtained by Axios, a majority of political advertising spend in the US goes to local broadcast TV. But an increasing amount goes to digital platforms.Other novelties of the year ahead in political advertising, the outlet said, are the use of AI to place ads. In August, the Federal Election Commission opened a public debate on how to address the malicious use of AI in campaign ads. The window for comments closed in October.The GroupM projection is higher by $6bn than similar political ad spending forecasts. AdImpact projects the 2023-2024 election cycle will be the most expensive of all time, totaling $10.2bn in political expenditures across all media and a 13% increase over the 2019-2020 election cycle.The survey projected that $2.7bn would be spent directly on presidential candidates, $2.1bn on Senate candidate spending, and $1.7bn on house candidates. The area projected to see the most spending on political advertising is “down ballot” – political spending not related to presidential, House, Senate or governor races, at $3.3bn. More

    • 175 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      TechScape: As the US election campaign heats up, so could the market for misinformation

      by

      X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, announced it will allow political advertising back on the platform – reversing a global ban on political ads since 2019. The move is the latest to stoke concerns about the ability of big tech to police online misinformation ahead of the 2024 elections – and X is not the only platform being scrutinised.Social media firms’ handlings of misinformation and divisive speech reached a breaking point in the 2020 US presidential elections when Donald Trump used online platforms to rile up his base, culminating in the storming of the Capitol building on 6 January 2021. But in the time since, companies have not strengthened their policies to prevent such crises, instead slowly stripping protections away. This erosion of safeguards, coupled with the rise of artificial intelligence, could create a perfect storm for 2024, experts warn.As the election cycle heats up, Twitter’s move this week is not the first to raise major concerns about the online landscape for 2024 – and it won’t be the last.Musk’s free speech fantasyTwitter’s change to election advertising policies is hardly surprising to those following the platform’s evolution under the leadership of Elon Musk, who purchased the company in 2022. In the months since his takeover, the erratic billionaire has made a number of unilateral changes to the site – not least of all the rebrand of Twitter to X.Many of these changes have centered on Musk’s goal to make Twitter profitable at all costs. The platform, he complained, was losing $4m per day at the time of his takeover, and he stated in July that its cash flow was still in the negative. More than half of the platform’s top advertisers have fled since the takeover – roughly 70% of the platforms leading advertisers were not spending there as of last December. For his part, this week Musk threatened to sue the Anti-Defamation League, saying, “based on what we’ve heard from advertisers, ADL seems to be responsible for most of our revenue loss”. Whatever the reason, his decision to re-allow political advertisers could help boost revenue at a time when X sorely needs it.But it’s not just about money. Musk has identified himself as a “free speech absolutist” and seems hell bent on turning the platform into a social media free-for-all. Shortly after taking the helm of Twitter, he lifted bans on the accounts of Trump and other rightwing super-spreaders of misinformation. Ahead of the elections, he has expressed a goal of turning Twitter into “digital town square” where voters and candidates can discuss politics and policies – solidified recently by its (disastrous) hosting of Republican governor Ron DeSantis’s campaign announcement.Misinformation experts and civil rights advocates have said this could spell disaster for future elections. “Elon Musk is using his absolute control over Twitter to exert dangerous influence over the 2024 election,” said Imran Ahmed, head of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a disinformation and hate speech watchdog that Musk himself has targeted in recent weeks.In addition to the policy changes, experts warn that the massive workforce reduction Twitter has carried out under Musk could impact the ability to deal with misinformation, as trust and safety teams are now reported to be woefully understaffed.Let the misinformation wars beginWhile Musk’s decisions have been the most high profile in recent weeks, it is not the only platform whose policies have raised alarm. In June, YouTube reversed its election integrity policy, now allowing content contesting the validity of the 2020 elections to remain on the platform. Meanwhile, Meta has also reinstated accounts of high-profile spreaders of misinformation, including Donald Trump and Robert F Kennedy Jr.Experts say these reversals could create an environment similar to that which fundamentally threatened democracy in 2020. But now there is an added risk: the meteoric rise of artificial intelligence tools. Generative AI, which has increased its capabilities in the last year, could streamline the ability to manipulate the public on a massive scale.Meta has a longstanding policy that exempts political ads from its misinformation policies and has declined to state whether that immunity will extend to manipulated and AI-generated images in the upcoming elections. Civil rights watchdogs have envisioned a worst-case scenario in which voters’ feeds are flooded with deceptively altered and fabricated images of political figures, eroding their ability to trust what they read online and chipping away at the foundations of democracy.While Twitter is not the only company rolling back its protections against misinformation, its extreme stances are moving the goalposts for the entire industry. The Washington Post reported this week that Meta was considering banning all political advertising on Facebook, but reversed course to better compete with its rival Twitter, which Musk had promised to transform into a haven for free speech. Meta also dissolved its Facebook Journalism Project, tasked with promoting accurate information online, and its “responsible innovation team,” which monitored the company’s products for potential risks, according to the Washington Post.Twitter may be the most scrutinised in recent weeks, but it’s clear that almost all platforms are moving towards an environment in which they throw up their hands and say they cannot or will not police dangerous misinformation online – and that should concern us all.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe wider TechScape David Shariatmadari goes deep with the co-founder of DeepMind about the mind-blowing potential of artificial intelligence in biotech in this long read. New tech news site 404 Media has published a distressing investigation into AI-generated mushroom-foraging books on Amazon. In a space where misinformation could mean the difference between eating something delicious and something deadly, the stakes are high. If you can’t beat them, join them: celebrities have been quietly working to sign deals licensing their artificially generated likenesses as the AI arms race continues. Elsewhere in AI – scammers are on the rise, and their tactics are terrifying. And the Guardian has blocked OpenAI from trawling its content. Can you be “shadowbanned” on a dating app? Some users are convinced their profiles are not being prioritised in the feed. A look into this very modern anxiety, and how the algorithms of online dating actually work. More

    • 150 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      Justice department alleges Google tried to ‘eliminate’ ad market rivals in lawsuit

      by

      Justice department alleges Google tried to ‘eliminate’ ad market rivals in lawsuitThe DoJ and eight states have filed a complaint against the tech company for violating antitrust laws The US justice department and eight states filed a lawsuit against Alphabet’s Google on Tuesday over allegations that the company abused its dominance of the digital advertising business, according to a court document.Google parent firm Alphabet to cut 12,000 jobs worldwideRead more“Google has used anticompetitive, exclusionary, and unlawful means to eliminate or severely diminish any threat to its dominance over digital advertising technologies,” the government said in its antitrust complaint.The government alleges that Google’s plan to assert dominance has been to “neutralize or eliminate” rivals through acquisitions and to force advertisers to use its products by making it difficult to use competitors’ products.The antitrust suit was filed in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia. Attorney general Merrick Garland said in a press conference Tuesday that Google’s dominance in the ad market means fewer publishers are able to offer their products without charging subscription or other fees, because they can’t rely on competition in the advertising market to keep ad prices low.As a result of Google’s dominance, he said, “website creators earn less and advertisers pay more”.The justice department asked the court to compel Google to divest its Google Ad manager suite, including its ad exchange AdX.The department’s suit accuses Google of unlawfully monopolizing the way ads are served online by excluding competitors. This includes its 2008 acquisition of DoubleClick, a dominant ad server, and subsequent rollout of technology that locks in the split-second bidding process for ads that get served on Web pages.Google’s ad manager lets large publishers who have significant direct sales manage their advertisements. The ad exchange, meanwhile, is a real-time marketplace to buy and sell online display ads.The lawsuit demands that Google break off three different businesses from its core business of search, YouTube and other products such as Gmail: the buying and selling of ads and ownership of the exchange where that business is transacted.Garland said that “for 15 years, Google has pursued a course of anti-competitive conduct” that has halted the rise of rival technologies and manipulated the mechanics of online ad auctions to force advertisers and publishers to use its tools.In so doing, he added, “Google has engaged in exclusionary conduct” that has “severely weakened”, if not destroyed competition in the ad tech industry.Alphabet Inc., Google’s parent company, said in a statement that the suit “doubles down on a flawed argument that would slow innovation, raise advertising fees, and make it harder for thousands of small businesses and publishers to grow”.The lawsuit is the second federal antitrust complaint filed against Google, alleging violations of antitrust law in how the company acquires or maintains its dominance. The justice department lawsuit filed against Google in 2020 focuses on its monopoly in search and is scheduled to go to trial in September.Eight states joined the department in the lawsuit filed on Tuesday, including Google’s home state of California. The states taking part in the suit include California, Virginia, Connecticut, Colorado, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island and Tennessee.Dina Srinivasan, a Yale University fellow and adtech expert, said the lawsuit is “huge” because it aligns the entire nation – state and federal governments – in a bipartisan legal offensive against Google.Google shares were down 1.3% on the news.While Google remains the market leader by a long shot, its share of the US digital ad revenue has been eroding, falling to 28.8% last year from 36.7% in 2016, according to Insider Intelligence. Google’s advertising business is responsible for about 80% of its revenue.TopicsGoogleAlphabetUS politicsAdvertisingnewsReuse this content More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Unregulated, unrestrained: era of the online political ad comes to midterms

      by

      Unregulated, unrestrained: era of the online political ad comes to midterms Parties once focused on TV but now a billion-dollar effort embraces the highly targeted and almost rule-free digital worldThe advert is in grainy black and white, with an edgy horror movie soundtrack. As gunfights erupt in the streets, the narrator announces in a gravelly bass voice that John Fetterman, Democratic candidate for a US Senate seat in Pennsylvania, “has a love affair with criminals”.Fetterman has voted “over and over to release the state’s most violent criminals, including murderers”, the narrator says. If elected, he would “keep the drugs flowing, the killers killing, and the children dying”.Republicans and Democrats are spending billions on ads – with very different messagesRead moreThe advert was laser-targeted on a demographic which was seminal in securing Joe Biden’s victory in 2020: women over 25 in the suburbs of Philadelphia. That same group could now hold the fate of the Senate in its hands.Should Philadelphia’s female suburban voters come out for Fetterman on 8 November, they could push him over the winning line in his battle with the Republican nominee, Mehmet Oz. That in turn could help the Democratic party retain control of the upper chamber, and by doing so keep Biden’s agenda alive.The stakes could not be higher. Yet the Philadelphia women who were bombarded with the “Fetterman loves criminals” ad 6m times over just 10 days through YouTube and Google were told next to nothing about who was behind it.“Paid for by Citizens for Sanity” is all that the advert reveals in small type at the end of the 30-second video. It took the sleuthing of the non-profit group Open Secrets to expose the producers as former members of Donald Trump’s inner circle, including the far-right senior White House adviser Stephen Miller.From the other side of the political spectrum comes another grainy black-and-white attack ad, titled Herschel Walker Can’t Be Our Senator. The ad is also targeted exclusively at women, but this time in Georgia, where another nail-bitingly close Senate race is reaching its climax.“Herschel Walker,” the ad begins, referring to the former NFL star now running as a Republican for a Georgia Senate seat. “Decades of violence against women. Guns. Razor blades. Choking. Stalking.”The female voters who were besieged by the ad some 60,000 times over four days were only told that it was created by a group named “Georgia Honor”. Open Secrets records that the group is a Super Pac that supports the incumbent Democratic senator, Raphael Warnock, and has so far spent $34m in assailing Walker.Two grainy black-and-white videos out of a vast mountain of political advertising which is on track this year to smash midterm spending records. It may even exceed the amount poured into the 2020 presidential cycle.The total investment in 2022 is projected by the non-partisan ad tracking firm AdImpact to be $9.7bn, pushing America close to a stunning new norm: the $10bn election.Of that, AdImpact estimates that 30% of the political advertising spend, about $2.9bn, is going into digital advertising or to ads placed through connected TV (CTV) – smart TVs that support video content streaming through apps such as Roku or Apple TV.Such vast sums suggest that the age of the online political ad is firmly upon us. It has been propelled by the “cord-cutting” generation which has dispensed with conventional television in favour of streaming and on-demand formats.Take Priorities USA, the largest Democratic Super Pac. It has decided to place its entire $30m spend in 2022 in the digital basket – the first time it has entirely dropped broadcast TV advertising.“Online is where more people are spending their time, especially Black and Latino voters who are critical to the coalition that we are trying to build,” Aneesa McMillan, Priorities’ deputy executive director, told the Guardian. Some 45% of the Super Pac’s spending this cycle has gone on reaching African American and Latino voters, using platform data on social media and YouTube, as well as keywords associated with demographic groups, to target the message.McMillan said that the shift online was informed by research. The group found that 75% of the TV ads they injected into House races in 2020 went to homes outside the congressional district to be consumed by people who could not even vote in the relevant elections.The conclusion was clear: “Digital is much more efficient,” she said.The rise of online political advertising began tentatively with Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign in 2008 and has grown exponentially every cycle since. Despite its billion-dollar size, the world of online political ads remains almost entirely unregulated.Outside groups, which have beamed millions of attack ads on to voters’ smart TVs and tablets this year, can do so without having to meet federal rules on disclosing who they are or whose money they are spending.“We live in an increasingly online society, and political campaigns are moving online, but federal transparency rules have never been updated to take that into account,” said Daniel Weiner, head of the elections and government program at the non-partisan Brennan Center.Adav Noti, legal director of the non-profit Campaign Legal Center, spent 10 years as a lawyer at the Federal Election Commission (FEC) which is responsible for enforcing campaign finance laws. He expressed dismay at the agency’s inability to keep up with a dramatically changing media landscape.“We are more than a decade into an era of campaigns increasingly being conducted through digital, and the only government agency charged with regulating that activity has done nothing about it. Literally not a single piece of regulation.”Noti said that one of the effects of the FEC failing to engage with the explosion in online political advertising has been that social media giants and other big digital platforms have been left to their own devices. “Facebook, Google, TikTok and the rest have become the de facto regulators, and they set their own rules.”The big players have gone in different directions. Facebook and Google have both set up public databases listing their political ads, introducing a modicum of transparency.Other platforms such as TikTok have prohibited political advertising, though candidates are increasingly using the sites directly as megaphones.Attempts by Congress to legislate for more accountability have all succumbed on the rock of Republican intransigence in the US Senate. The Honest Ads Act, a bipartisan bill backed by the Brennan Center that would make digital ads subject to the same disclosure rules as broadcast TV and radio, was included in the Freedom to Vote Act that failed to overcome a Republican filibuster in January.In the absence of central regulation, outside groups can distribute extreme or false messages with impunity. Citizens for Sanity, the Super Pac created by former Trump advisers, blasted out an advert last month attacking Biden’s immigration policy.It was viewed 600,000 times over nine days by voters in the border state of Arizona.“Who is Joe Biden letting in?” its female narrator asks. “Joe Biden and his fellow Democrats have erased our southern border and released a record number of illegal immigrants into the United States, all at your expense.”The ad goes on to warn about a “giant flood of illegal immigration” that was “threatening your family”. It accuses Biden of allowing drug dealers, sex traffickers and violent predators into the country, one of whom raped a little girl.“She was three years old,” the narrator says.The Poynter Institute’s factchecking unit, Politifact, reviewed the ad. It found that the immigrant who allegedly sexually assaulted a three-year old girl had been in the US since at least 2011; he has been behind bars since February 2020 – almost a year before Biden entered the White House.Politifact rated the advert “False”.TopicsUS midterm elections 2022US politicsSocial mediaAdvertisingDigital mediaRepublicansDemocratsfeaturesReuse this content More

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      Republicans and Democrats spend big on ads for US midterms

      by

      Republicans and Democrats spend big on ads for US midtermsThe rival parties have outspent the 2020 presidential election on ads addressing abortion, crime and the economy As the US midterm elections loom, Republicans and Democrats have spent almost $10bn (£8.6bn) so far on ads. It’s a staggering figure, one that exceeds even the spending on the 2020 presidential election, and is almost triple the amount spent during the last midterms.Both parties – and their dark money backers – have splashed exorbitant amounts on TV, digital and print advertising, but their focus has been very different.For Democrats, abortion has been a key issue. The party has spent almost 20 times more than it did on abortion-related ads in the 2018 midterms, NPR reported. For Republicans, there have been different messages: that inflation, crime and taxes are out of control.The result has been a whirling atmosphere for the average American, where to turn on the TV is frequently to see the two parties, and their candidates, talking straight past one another about different things.AbortionAfter the conservative-dominated supreme court overturned the federal right to abortion in June, the issue of who should have control over women’s bodies has been front and center in many midterm races.Democrats have run more than 240 ads related to abortion rights, seeking to draw attention to the extreme positions of many Republican candidates. These largely centered the personal stories of women who have had abortions. One of the most powerful ads has run in South Carolina, where Joe Cunningham, a Democrat, is bidding to defeat Henry McMaster, the state’s Republican governor.In the ad, a woman named Fran explains that she was raped by two men when she was 12 years old. She later found out she was pregnant. Fran was able to have an abortion due to Roe v Wade, then recently decided, which legalised abortion in the US.“Roe versus Wade gave me the opportunity to become an educator, a mother and grandmother,” Fran says in the ad.“I did what was best for an 88-pound 12-year-old with no other options. I am a survivor of rape: my body is not yours, and it is not the state’s, it’s mine – yet our governor, Henry McMaster, wants to ban all abortions.”In Pennsylvania, Democrats have repeatedly targeted Mehmet Oz, a celebrity doctor running as a Republican for the US Senate, over his opposition to abortion, and an ad launched in mid-October features a Pennsylvania doctor describing how, pre-Roe v Wade, he was trained to treat the victims of “back-alley abortions”.“Too often, women died. I thought those days were long behind us. But not so, with Mehmet Oz,” the doctor says.One of the most harrowing ads of the entire election cycle comes from Eric Swalwell, a Democratic congressman for California.It shows a family eating dinner at home when two police officers to arrest the mother for “unlawful termination of a pregnancy”. When her partner attempts to intervene, the officers draw their guns on him, prompting screaming from the couple’s young children as the woman is handcuffed.“Elections have consequences,” a voiceover says. “Stop Republicans from criminalizing abortion everywhere.”Republicans, by contrast, have spent a fraction of the Democrats’ total on abortion ads. When candidates have addressed the issue, there has been a two-pronged approach: commercials have claimed, often spuriously, that their Democratic opponents are too extreme on abortion, and that the Republican candidates themselves are moderate.An ad that aired in Arizona in September, where Republican Blake Masters is hoping to win Mark Kelly’s Senate seat, managed to combine both.His ad, prosaically titled Arizona’s Mark Kelly Supports Painful Late Abortions, is full of mistruths and dishonest statements – a theme that has run through a majority of TV ads nationwide during the election campaign – claiming wrongly that Kelly supports abortion “right up to the due date”, and stating that Masters himself has sought “compromise” on the issue, despite the Republican having backed proposals that would ban all abortion, with no exceptions for rape or incest.Cost of livingThe big spending from Republicans has come on cost of living issues, including taxation and inflation, which reached a 40-year high of 9.1% in June and was at 8.2% in September. Across the country, Republican ads have sought to blame Joe Biden for the rise, frequently citing the $1.9tn coronavirus relief bill he signed in March 2021 as the cause.In September, ads on inflation accounted for 32% of all pro-GOP advertising, according to the Wesleyan Media Project, and in South Carolina, Republican Nancy Mace has tied the rise in price of everyday items not just to Joe Biden, but Nancy Pelosi, too, in a TV ad called Eggs.The ad shows Mace, a Republican congresswoman, pouring a glass of milk and cooking some bacon. The price of both has increased, she notes, adding: “I have had it with crazy inflation.”As the ad continues, Mace offers her plan to bring down the cost of living. It is an unusual plan.“Here’s what I’m going to do to Biden’s tax and spend agenda,” Mace says. She then cracks an egg and tips the contents into a frying pan.Other ads have been less avant-garde. An ad running against Raphael Warnock, Georgia’s Democratic senator, also features a clip of some bacon, along with a gas pump, as a breathless voiceover claims Georgia has been “hit hard by sky-high inflation”.Economists tend to agree that the American Rescue Plan did worsen inflation, Vox reported recently, but there are varying estimates as to how much, and others note that the plan did improve the economy.Democrats, meanwhile, haven’t done much in the way of pushing back. Wesleyan said inflation makes up only 8% of the party and its backers’ ads, and some Democratic leaders themselves agree that their message has been unconvincing.The party seems to be picking up the idea up, though, and has released ads on the economy in the last week, including one in New Hampshire which is undermined slightly by some rather unconvincing acting:The Party bossesIn a neat symmetry, both parties appear to be running from their leaders. According to the Washington Post, since early September Democrats have spent just $3m on ads centering Joe Biden, and Republicans have spent a mere $807,000 on ads highlighting Trump.Each party has, though, run plenty of ads focusing on their opposing party’s bosses. Republicans have blasted out ad after ad criticizing Biden, mostly over spending during the pandemic. Mindful of Biden’s low approval rating – which is currently averaging about 42% – Republicans have sought to tie Democratic candidates across the country to the president.That effort contributed to possibly the daftest ad of the entire campaign season: a singsong affair titled Hidin’ Biden that ran against Democratic congresswoman Sharice Davids in Kansas:Complete with lyrics like: “Sharice Davids, what’s she hidin’, Sharice Davids, she’s hidin’ Biden”, the piano-driven tune highlights that Davids has frequently voted for Biden-backed policies.It’s a similar but less jaunty story in New Hampshire, where voters are warned that Maggie Hassan, the incumbent US senator who is being challenged by Don Bolduc, a Republican and an election denier, “votes with Joe Biden over 96% of the time”:Republicans are clearly banking that Biden is unpopular enough to turn voters away from candidates who have even the loosest connection to the president. The GOP, as FiveThirtyEight pointed out, has replicated this format in Colorado, Michigan, Ohio and Arizona.CrimeCrime is the only issue where Republicans and Democrats come close to equal spending, according to the Washington Post. Republicans, frequently pushing a dystopian vision of cities ridden by murder and violent crime, have spent $49m on ads discussing crime since early September, compared to $36m invested by Democrats.The number of murders in major cities has fallen so far in 2022, but remains above the numbers in 2019, and a survey by the Major Cities Chiefs Association found that violent crime had risen 4.2% through the first six months of this year compared with 2021.That has given Republicans plenty of fodder to paint Democrats as soft on crime, in some cases, with racist overtones. “In states as disparate as Wisconsin and New Mexico, ads have labeled a Black candidate as ‘different’ and ‘dangerous’ and darkened a white man’s hands as they portrayed him as a criminal,” the New York Times wrote of the trend.Mandela Barnes is the subject of the Wisconsin ad, which ends with Barnes’s face positioned next to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar – all women of color – while the words “different” and “dangerous” flash across the screen:In Pennsylvania, Oz has run several ads on crime, claiming: “Today’s kids aren’t safe in our communities.” One spot, titled Crazy Dangerous Ideas, accuses Fetterman of “emptying our prisons”, which, according to the ad, would lead to “more hardened criminals on our streets”:Democrats, for their part, have run ads featuring themselves with police officers in an effort to rebut Republican claims that the left will defund police forces.Fetterman has created ads highlighting the work he did to bring down violent crime in Braddock, where he spent 13 years as mayor, with one featuring a local sheriff. Barnes, meanwhile, recruited a retired police sergeant for an ad in September:“I worked on the force for 30 years,” the retired officer, called Rick, says.“I’ve seen plenty of politicians. But Mandela, he’s the real deal. Mandela doesn’t want to defund the police. He’s very supportive of law enforcement.”With less than a week to go until America votes, it remains to be seen which of the party’s strategies will have the most impact.In the weeks following the supreme court’s Roe v Wade decision, abortion rights became one of the most important issues for voters – and with Democrats’ huge investment in abortion-related ads, the party has been counting on it turning out the vote.But as inflation and gas prices have risen, polls show that the economy has emerged as the key issue for voters.Over the past couple of weeks some Democrats, including Bernie Sanders, have urged their party to focus on plans for economic recovery, and late-running ads could reflect voters’ concerns. As the election looms, Democratic supporters will be hoping it’s not a case of too little too late.TopicsUS midterm elections 2022AdvertisingUS politicsRepublicansDemocratsfeaturesReuse this content More

    • 138 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      Incendiary Republican ads boasting of ‘hunting’ rivals raise fears of violence

      by

      Incendiary Republican ads boasting of ‘hunting’ rivals raise fears of violenceAds like Eric Greitens’, in which he says ‘get a Rino hunting permit’, could lead people to rationalize violence – experts Before the Capitol attack on 6 January, Robert Pape, a University of Chicago professor, had studied political violence around the world but not in the United States because there had not been much to examine, he said.Pape worries that could soon change because of politicians like Eric Greitens, a former Navy Seal from Missouri running for Senate, who recently released an advertisement in which he racked a shotgun and led a team of armed men as they stormed a house to hunt more moderate members of his own party, know derisively as Rinos, as in “Republicans in name only”.“Join the Maga crew,” Greitens, a former Republican governor, declares in the ad. “Get a Rino hunting permit. There’s no bagging limit, no tagging limit, and it doesn’t expire until we save our country.”But such messaging won’t save lives and instead could lead people to rationalize committing violence against those with whom they have political disagreements, according to Pape and other political scientists.“This is important, not because [Greitens] himself will necessarily do any violent act, but what is happening is that the more there is community support for violence, this lowers the threshold for volatile actors to act violently,” said Pape, who directs the Chicago Project on Security and Threats.Public figures on the left – and a smattering on the right – condemned the ad, and Facebook removed the video for violating its violence and incitement policies.This is not the first time that Greitens has released such a campaign video. In April, he posted one on Twitter in which he and Donald Trump Jr, fired rifles at a range. In the accompanying text he wrote, “Striking fear into the hearts of liberals, Rinos, and the fake media.”Greitens leads the Republican primary for Senate, according to recent polls, in spite of allegations that he committed campaign violations and was abusive to his wife, who has since divorced him, their children and a woman with whom he had an affair.Nor is he alone among Republicans in producing incendiary advertisements featuring guns. More than 100 television ads this year from the party’s candidates and supportive groups have included guns as talking points or visual motifs, according to the New York Times.In the Republican Senate primary in Pennsylvania, Dave McCormick, who later narrowly lost, ran an ad in which he recalled his experiences with various guns and said, “I approve this message to protect the second amendment because that’s what guarantees the rest of it.”But Greitens’ spot differs from other Republican candidates’ videos in that it shows him and the other men targeting political opponents rather than, for example, shooting an inanimate object, the political scientists said.“What I do not recall seeing before is actually verbalizing that the target is other people,” said Erika Franklin Fowler, a professor of government at Wesleyan University, and an author of a report on guns in recent political advertising.The video also differed from other incendiary advertisements in that Greitens says people in his own party should be targeted.“Republicans are competing against each other for the nomination there, so it’s not unusual to hear within-party criticism, but I’ve never heard such vitriol against their own party from a candidate, let alone in an ad that was presumably vetted by several people in the campaign,” Nathan Kalmoe, professor of political communication at Louisiana State University and author of Radical American Partisanship, stated in an email.The political scientists also expressed concern over the video because he is among the Republican candidates who promote the false conspiracy theory that the 2020 election was rigged against Donald Trump.“It’s of extreme concern to me that fairly mainstream Republicans have jumped on that wagon in order to win in primaries,” said David Romano, a Missouri State University professor who researches and teaches about political violence. “If [Republicans] think it’s rigged again in the next presidential election, then it’s not a far step to much more widespread violence, like we saw on January 6.”Pape, who has studied conflicts in the Middle East and eastern Europe, worries that such messaging could lead to similar violence in the United States. He traced his concern to events such as the May mass shooting in Buffalo. The alleged perpetrator targeted Black people and cited the “great replacement” conspiracy theory that non-white individuals are being brought to America to replace white voters and achieve an agenda.“There is every reason to believe our country will follow the trajectory of other countries and societies where this kind of rhetoric is in the mainstream,” said Pape.Pape has called for a “public conversation about the consequences of community support for violence in the mainstream”.He testified at a Senate judiciary committee earlier this month on the “metastasizing” domestic terrorism threat. Pape said he saw it as a positive step that a bipartisan group of senators held such a hearing and “were not at each other’s throats”.“They didn’t fully agree by any stretch,” Pape said. “There are differences, but they were trying to think through these issues of political violence in the mainstream, and it’s a challenge because this is not a problem that’s been around for 30 years.”TopicsRepublicansAdvertisingUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

    • 163 Shares109 Views

      in Elections

      Group aims to strip Fox News of ad revenue over ‘fueling next insurrection’

      by

      Group aims to strip Fox News of ad revenue over ‘fueling next insurrection’Check My Ads targeting news channel website at a time when its prominent hosts are downplaying January 6 insurrection After two years which have seen Fox News lunge even further towards the right wing of US politics, the news channel may now start to suffer the consequences, with the launch of a campaign to strip the news channel’s Foxnews.com website of advertising revenue.Check My Ads, an organization run by two former marketing executives, launched its campaign to target Fox News in early June, accusing the news channel and its website of “working overtime to fuel the next insurrection”.More than 40,000 people signed up in the first five days, forming an increasingly powerful lobbying group which aims to get ad exchanges to drop Foxnews.com.The campaign comes at a time when prominent Fox News hosts are downplaying the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol in Washington DC as “a forgettably minor outbreak” of “mob violence”, continuing to dabble in election conspiracy theories, and have most recently begun to brand school teachers and drag performers as “groomers”.Check My Ads was founded by two marketing executives who have a deep understanding of how advertising appears on websites. Despite its record of dabbling in misinformation, adverts for companies like Walgreens and Optimum can still be found on Foxnews.com. The adverts are largely placed there, Atkin said, by ad exchanges, which handle the distribution of adverts for advertising agencies.“Foxnews.com benefits enormously from being a part of the global advertising society. Foxnews.com receives ads from blue chip brands, which gives incredible legitimacy to the lies that they are publishing. That brand equity is intrinsically valuable,” Atkin said.A number of large companies have already stopped advertising on the Fox News after various misdeeds by its TV hosts over the years. But ads for Walgreens and the like still pop up on the Fox News website, despite the obvious link between the two entities. Whereas viewers of the TV channel might see adverts for relatively little known companies, like Nutrisystem and Balance of Nature, visitors to the website see the names of big companies, which can suggest to the reader that this is a respected website.“When Fox is plugged into that ads supply chain, it gives them the legitimacy of a real news outlet, when in fact they are publishing disinformation regularly that leads to real-world violence.”In the two weeks following the 2020 election, Fox News cast doubt on, or pushed conspiracy theories about the result 774 times, according to Media Matters for America, a watchdog group. That helped to fuel anger among Donald Trump’s supporters – rage which came to the surface on 6 January, when hundreds of Trump’s adherents stormed the US Capitol.Since the Capitol attack, Fox News hosts have rubbished the idea that the storming of the building – done in an attempt to stop Joe Biden being declared president – was an insurrection. Fox News viewers have instead heard that it was a minor skirmish, one which may even have been orchestrated by the government.That’s why, Atkin said, Check My Ads is determined to trim the network’s wings.“Advertisers have been crystal clear that they do not want to sponsor violence. And we all saw what happened on January 6. It’s not just violence, this was the attempted overthrow of the government. This is world-scale political violence,” Atkin said.Ad exchanges vet certain websites before placing adverts on behalf of their clients. If a website meets their criteria – and the criteria often include statements that the website does not endorse or encourage harassment or bullying – then ads are placed on them.But the exchanges, Atkin said, are “not checking their inventory” thoroughly enough, and websites like Fox News are slipping through the cracks.Check My Ads’ campaign works by finding which ad exchanges are active on a given website, which is easy enough to do: typing https://www.foxnews.com/ads.txt brings up the list.The innovative part of Check My Ads is how the organization has set up a way for people to send swift, concise complaints to those ad exchanges. The organization sends out email templates to those who sign up, which they can send on to ad exchanges, flagging sites where the exchange has placed ads on sites which are incompatible with the exchanges’ stated policy.“The ad exchanges promise in their legal documentation in these policies that are available online to anyone: ‘We only work with premium publishers and we will never work with websites that publish election disinformation, the promotion of real world violence, all of these other things,” Atkin said.“That is providing a sense of false confidence to advertisers. Because as we know, these ad exchanges are still sending ads and money and data to the propaganda outlets that are doing our society the most harm, and who are the most brand unsafe.”In a statement, Fox News said: “Fox News Media strongly supports the first amendment and is proud to lead the industry in featuring more dissenting viewpoints on the major issues facing the country than our cable news competitors, which is why we attract the most politically diverse audience in television news.”The campaign isn’t going to financially cripple Fox News. Some 95% of Fox’s revenue comes from cable contracts, as opposed to advertising, NPR reported this year. But Atkin believes the campaign, as well as removing ads which lend legitimacy to Fox News, could also prevent Foxnews.com from collecting data on its users so that they can be later targeted with specific content – potentially anti-democratic content.Fox News is the most-watched cable news channel in the US, and is a huge opponent. But Check My Ads are hopeful that they have found a foolproof way to at least take away some of its power.“The fact is that the advertising industry, in general, has said one thing and it has done another,” she said.“We are opening the conversation up for everyone who wants to say enough is enough.”TopicsFox NewsAdvertisingTV newsTelevision industryUS Capitol attacknewsReuse this content More

    • 163 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      The Guardian view on Facebook and democracy: real and present danger | Editorial

      by

      In every political debate since Facebook began to dominate democracy, the company has placed itself on the wrong side of history. The social media firm cannot be reformed from within because its business model profits from hosting bomb-throwing circuses of hate, humbug and hogwash. The platform harvests users’ personal data to algorithmically recommend content but […] More