Do Online Advertisements Increase Political Candidates’ Name Recognition or Favorability? Evidence from Randomized Field Experiments
By David E. Broockman, Donald P. Green. 2014
121 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Internet advertisements are an increasingly common form of mass communication and present fresh opportunities for understanding enduring questions about political persuasion. However, the effects of online ads on electoral choice have received little scholarly attention. We develop a new field experimental approach for assessing the effects of online advertisements and deploy it in two studies. In each study, candidates for legislative office targeted randomly selected segments of their constituencies for a high volume of Facebook advertising. Recall of the ads, candidate name recognition, and candidate evaluations were measured with ostensibly unrelated telephone surveys after weeklong advertising campaigns. Voters randomly exposed to the ads were in some cases more likely to recall them but no more likely to recognize or positively evaluate the candidates they depicted. From a theoretical standpoint, these findings suggest that even frequent exposure to advertising messages may be insufficient to impart new information or change attitudes.
Subfields: Communication, Political Science and International Relations, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/dc7d56e06dfa27d39eb2aa60f8438543bf7a1270
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Citations in the corpus
- The Unfavorable Economics of Measuring the Returns to Advertising (2015, background): “Heavily advertised categories such as high-end durable goods, subscription services such as credit cards, voting (Broockman and Green, 2013) and infrequent big-ticket purchases like vacations all seem to have consumption patterns that are more volatile than the retailers we studied selling sweaters ”
- How Gullible are We? A Review of the Evidence from Psychology and Social Science (2017, unknown): “…with a product (Oliver, 2014) or price (Tellis, 2003), the effects of advertising are very small (Blake, Nosko, & Tadelis, 2014; DellaVigna & Gentzkow, 2010; Sethuraman, Tellis, & Briesch, 2011; Tellis, 2003; for political ads, see Broockman & Green, 2014; Gerber, Gimpel, Green, & Shaw, 2011).”