Making your mind or chaning it???

In politics, campaign advertising is the use of an advertising campaign through newspapers, radio commercials, television commercials, etc.) to influence the decisions made for and by groups.

It can include several different mediums and span several months over the course of a political campaign. Unlike campaign finance, there are very few regulations governing the process, and many candidates use various techniques to influence their intended audience. Why would they do all these??

Let’s look at the example from Obama 

A new analysis shows that the Obama campaign continues to have superiority over the Romney campaign and its allies when it comes to TV ads. The report also finds that political ads are the most negative since 2000, and that the leading advertiser in congressional races is Karl Rove's tax-exempt group Crossroads GPS.
Why is that so??
Political advertising has become key to winning any political election, especially presidential campaigns. As Election Day draws near, voters are barraged by a plethora of political advertising. When the public turns on their TV, computer, or radio, when they walk outside, or when they look in their mailbox, political advertising is everywhere. Not only does it come from different places, but political advertising comes in many assorted forms as well. They might be attack ads or emotional ads or issue ads. There are almost no rules for political advertising.
Political advertising campaigns appear throughout all forms of media, including broadcast, Internet, print, and outdoor media. In broadcast media, political advertising appears mainly in the form of radio and television ads. Internet media is a new and rapidly growing part of political campaigning. Currently, ads, blogs, wikis, YouTube videos, websites, and podcasts are popular, but the Internet is still evolving. Print media is a diverse form of media. There are newspapers, magazines, periodicals, pamphlets, circulars, and fliers. For outdoor media, billboards, bumper stickers, and lawn signs are commonly used.
There are many different types of political advertisements. Most are attack ads, better know as smear ads. An attack ad is an advertisement meant to attack an opposing candidate or political party. They are generally negative and criticize the adversary’s political platform by highlighting the opponent’s faults and comparing them to the candidate’s own platform. However, biographical, emotional, endorsement, factual, humorous, issue, personal, record, and response ads are also used. A biographical ad is an advertisement that states the candidate’s past careers and education, while an emotional ad is an advertisement that reaches its audience on an emotional level. For example, an emotional ad might show a soldier’s mother grieving over her son’s casket with the message “How many more mothers need to bury their sons before the U.S. army leaves Iraq? Vote for ***. He/she will end this war.”  In this case we see President Obama using health care, economy, jobs, welfare and many different other ideas to help prove his point.

In the final three weeks of September, nearly $90 million worth of ads aired in the presidential race. Erica Franklin Fowler, a professor at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, says a new record for number of ads should be set next week or the week after. She says that just about the only thing that hasn't taken off in the presidential air wars is the number of spots supporting Republican Mitt Romney.

Even though we might think of a short video clip as something pretty harmless. But 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. “Both sides are looking for an edge, and more rigorous science leads to more efficient campaigning,” he says.

Ted Brader wrote a book “Campaigning for hearts and minds” in which at the heart of the book are ingenious experiments, conducted by Brader during an election, with truly eye-opening results that upset conventional wisdom. They show, for example, that simply changing the music or imagery of ads while retaining the same text provokes completely different responses. Which we clearly see in this clip by Barak Obama. He reveals that politically informed citizens are more easily manipulated by emotional appeals than less-involved citizens and that positive "enthusiasm ads" are in fact more polarizing than negative "fear ads." Black-and-white video images are ten times more likely to signal an appeal to fear or anger than one of enthusiasm or pride, and the emotional appeal triumphs over the logical appeal in nearly three-quarters of all political ads. Brader backs up these surprising findings with an unprecedented survey of emotional appeals in contemporary political campaigns. Politicians do set out to campaign for the hearts and minds of voters, and, for better or for worse; it is primarily through hearts that minds are won.

Now that we have looked how the political ads have been manipulated to get our votes and change our minds. I hope what you get from this reading is that there are so many persuasions going on. At the end of the pay attention and see what they are appealing to in a political ad. So if you pay attention that might help make your mind up about a certain contestant. The choice will be yours at the end of the day once you have analyzed all the different parts of it. 

Jon Zahidi

azahidi@regis.edu

References:
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo3640346.html

Aronson, E. (2011). The Social Animal. (11 ed). New York:Worth Publishers

English, K., Sweetser, K. D., & Ancu, M. (2011). YouTube-ification of political talk: An examination of persuasion appeals in viral video. American Behavioral Scientist, 55(6), 733-748. doi:10.1177/0002764211398090

Marks, E., Manning, M., & Ajzen, I. (2012). The impact of negative campaign ads. Journal Of Applied Social Psychology, 42(5), 1280-1292. doi:10.1111/j.1559-1816.2012.00912.x