Reinventing Political Advertising

By Hal Malchow

The books reviews measurements of the small effects of political advertising and recommends ways to improve its small effects, It prresents data showing the political ads are targeted to exactly the wrong voters and offers a new targeting strategy to improve the effects of political ads.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Self Published
• Release date: Sep 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9798218267384

Book preview

9798218267373_Fcvr.jpg

Reinventing Political Advertising

Hal Malchow

Copyrigh

t © 2023 Hal Malchow

All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading and electronic sharing of any part of this book without permission of the author is unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from this book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the author at 2551 Tano Compound Drive, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87506. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

979-8-218-26737-3 (paperback)

979-8-218-26738-4 (ebook)

Library of Congress number: 2023916339

Printed in the USA

First Edition September 2023

Foreword

This book is about advertising, its limits and how to do it better. But before getting into its limits, its complexity and its impact, let’s clear the air about this topic.

No one really likes advertising.

Have you ever sat in your living room watching TV and called to your friend or relative, Hurry and get in here, the ads are about to start!

Have you ever been watching a recorded TV program and not skipped the ads? Maybe some people haven’t skipped but try getting them to admit it.,

Has someone ever told you, I know it’s true. I saw it in an ad.

Oh occasionally, someone will create an ad the moves you or tells you something important or new. It happens. Once a year. Every other year. Always at least once a decade.

This book is not just about advertising. It is about political advertising, a version more disliked and more distrusted than the standard fare.

Sadly, in politics advertising is mostly how we win or lose. Our marketing faces a special challenge. Unlike commercial products which can thrive on a two percent market share, in our business, 49% market share is failure.

Total failure.

Our candidates make speeches, hold press conferences and appear at events. But the people they draw or reach are a tiny percentage of the voters they need. To cobble together a full majority of the voting electorate, we need advertising.

As I will explain, the power of political advertising is small. When you measure its effects, and its effects are measurable, the voters who are moved are a tiny percentage of the whole.

But while we know advertising moves a small number of voters, research and testing, almost completely ignored by practitioners, points to much larger impacts – impacts that can make the difference in close election campaigns.

You will learn in this book that the impact of advertising may be small but that some voters, voters with little information about politics can be moved in much larger ways. If you want to change someone’s mind you have to show them new information. For voters with little or no information about politics, what they learn from an ad is far more likely to be new.

In one experiment, the voters divided into those who knew which party controlled congress and those who didn’t. In response to three mailings, voters who knew, moved less than one percentage point (<1%). Those who did not know, moved nineteen points.

So advertising can have large impacts if you show it to voters who are largely ignored in today’s campaigns.

You will learn about experiments that compared traditional persuasion mail, with big pictures, colors, bold headlines and short copy underperformed plain letters, simply produced with no color or graphic enhancement at all. Meanwhile, a simple letter that did not endorse a candidate or take a position on an issue but simply provided unbiased information on two candidates, moved voters a point and a half. This was a breakthrough was a critical element in helping the Democrats regain the House in 2018. The lesson? In political advertising, credibility is the most important element of success.

Most importantly, you will learn that the leaders who create our advertising are barely paying attention to the research at all. By failing to do so they are squandering a large opportunity to make our ads more effective and to win more elections.

This book is for Democratic practitioners who create our advertising, place our advertising and supervise the strategies that unfold in a modern campaign. As you have probably already learned, you cannot buy this book on Amazon. It is being promoted on Democratic email lists, Democratic websites and by word of mouth among Democrats.

The lessons we have learned but have not put into use are many. Even larger are the lessons we have yet to learn because we have not invested in measuring new approaches and ideas. Many companies spend five, ten, even twenty percent of their revenues on research and development. No one knows what percentage of our campaign expenditures go to research. But in our campaign politics industry that figure might not exceed one percent.

Therefore, this book is about two things. First, it is about how to use what we already know to make our campaign advertising much more effective. Second, it is about new ideas driven by existing research that, if tested and measured, might deliver even more improvement in what we do. Not all these ideas will work but even those that fail will add to our knowledge and show other ways to win more elections.

Today, Americans look at one another across a great and bitter partisan divide. At stake are the prosperities of rich and poor, access to quality and affordable health care, better education, fair taxation, secure retirements, climate change and, in this most recent year, war and peace itself.

While the issues are large our weapons are weak. Political advertising, as it is currently done, decides few election outcomes. Perhaps, it is ironic that battles over war and peace come down, in large part, to the unsavory skills of advertisers. That is our world. This book is about what new skills and new strategies can provide Democrats with the upper hand.

The goal of most advertising is to change someone’s mind. There is a rich science on how we hold beliefs, how we consider challenges to those beliefs and what causes our brains to embrace a new decision. Before we talk about television, digital and mail, let’s start by talking about science and what it has to say about the formidable and difficult task of changing someone’s mind.

Part One

In the Beginning

Chapter One

Before Television

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr

Who among us has not witnessed the vitriolic rhetoric of modern politics and wondered why can’t our leaders be more like those statesmen who founded our nation? These individuals, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison are enshrined in monuments and shaped in statues of white marble.

If those statues could speak, you might be shocked.

Describing the early days of our republic, Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick wrote nothing was more central than the massive personal and political enmity, classic in the annals of American history, which developed in the course of the 1790s between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson.¹

The conflict rested on two opposing visions for America. The Federalists, led by Alexander Hamilton, George Washington and John Adams, supported a strong federal government, promotion of industry and stronger trade with England. The Republican Party, which later became the Democratic Party, was led by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. The Republicans supported a more limited federal government with more power in the states and saw America as an agricultural nation where small farmers and rural communities were the backbone of the economy. So strong was their belief in an agricultural nation that Jefferson wrote, upon his return from being Ambassador to France, that circumstances rendered it impossible that America should become a manufacturing country during the time of any man now living.²

Despite Hamilton’s campaign for ratification of the new constitution, Jefferson referred to Hamilton as a monarchist,³ a charge that, in the wake of the war for independence, was the equivalent of being charged with the murder of your own dog. Hamilton, according to Jefferson, was not only a monarchist but advocated for a monarchy bottomed on corruption.⁴,⁵

Hamilton, in one of many articles penned using pseudonyms, charged that Jefferson was a despot in disguise, masking political ambitions behind Republican simplicity.⁶ He contended that Jefferson had first opposed the Constitution then adopted it from expediency.⁷

Donald Trump did not invent fake news. None of these charges were remotely true.

Hamilton made oblique suggestions about Jefferson’s dark lifestyle, a reference to his life with Sally Hemmings.⁸ Jefferson, through surrogates, shared information about an out of wedlock affair (true) conducted by Hamilton.⁹ So distressed was Hamilton that he penned a long and detailed public confession that did him more harm than good.

Apart from commercial papers, Jefferson and Hamilton set up newspapers of their own controlled by editors who were paid by party donors or, in Jefferson’s case, the taxpayers themselves. At the initiative of Alexander Hamilton, the Federalist party launched The Gazette of the United States, the earliest of a series of newspapers that promoted the Federalist candidates and policies. Jefferson and Madison responded by instructing John Freneau, an employed translator at Jefferson’s State Department, to launch the National Gazette, which attacked Federalist policies and, especially, Hamilton, with the editor paid by with State Department funds. Not only did Jefferson’s State Department provide Freneau’s salary, it supported the newspaper with lucrative printing contracts.

The rhetoric of the party newspapers could be virulent. Noah Webster, later of dictionary fame and often called The Father of American Scholarship and Education, wandered into this dispute when he accepted a position editing a new Federalist newspaper.

Jefferson’s militia immediately went on the attack calling Webster a pure lunatic, a deceitful newsmongerer, a prostitute wretch, a barefaced liar, and, perhaps the best of these epithets, a toad in the service of sans culottism.¹⁰

Worse, Hamilton, Jefferson and Madison signed their diatribes with pseudonyms like Caesar and Phocion (Hamilton) and Publius (Madison). The use of pseudonyms to make the author anonymous was a common journalistic practice of the time.

Whatever comparisons might be made with the political dialogue of today, the conduct of our early founders set a comparative standard for malicious language and a disregard for truth. Today’s statues standing silent allow us to remember them as upright statesmen. But in truth, they were politicians whose fierce disagreements led to rhetoric that resembles much of what we see today.

Before the Vote

Most Americans surely believe that our democracy began when voters across the nation went to the polls and elected George Washington as our first president. In fact, American citizens had barely a voice in the matter. The history of American democracy does not begin with the vote.

To avert granting unfettered power to an untested electorate, the framers of the constitution created the electoral college to choose the nation’s president. In doing so, they granted to the state legislatures the power to select those electors in any way they chose.

Not surprisingly, state legislatures decided to select the electors themselves. If no candidate won a majority of the nationwide electors, the choice of a president went to the House of Representatives. Choosing George Washington, who ran unopposed, was easy. But subsequent contests were decided in back rooms, often driven by deals that benefited individual electors more than the public at large. Gradually, democracy improved.

In the first decades of the republic, state legislators granted voters the right to choose presidential electors and, just as importantly, the right of suffrage was expanded. In most states, property ownership was jettisoned as a requirement for voting. Women were still excluded, but the popular vote, with its limitations by gender and race, made its early appearance in presidential politics.

Campaigns followed. As distrust of the populous retreated a broader version of democracy began to emerge.

Invisible Candidates

While the bitter feud between Jefferson and Hamilton might remind us of our politics today, the actual conduct of the presidential campaigns bore no resemblance to today’s campaigns. Imagine, if you will, a candidate for President of the United States. He receives the nomination at the party’s convention which he does not attend. Then with election day only three months away, he goes to his home and waits quietly for the balloting to begin.

The candidate makes no speeches. He greets some visitors. He writes letters and some of those might explain his position on issues. When asked why he does not campaign, he responds that to travel across the country making speeches would diminish the dignity of the office. As Andrew Jackson professed in words that described the conduct of early presidential candidates, I meddle not with elections. I leave to the people to make their own president.¹¹

Refusing to make speeches or campaign appearances seems surprising today. For most of our