Political Advertising in the 21st Century: The Influence of the YouTube Ad

Transcription

1 Political Advertising in the 21st Century: The Influence of the YouTube Ad Travis N. Ridout Associate Professor Department of Political Science Washington State University 816 Johnson Tower, Troy Lane Pullman WA Erika Franklin Fowler Assistant Professor Department of Government Wesleyan University 238 Church Street Middletown CT John Branstetter Graduate Student Department of Political Science University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) 4289 Bunche Hall, Los Angeles, CA March 8, 2012 Abstract: This paper explores the influence of online political advertising in the form of digital videos posted on YouTube. We focus on the various campaigns for U.S. Senate in Using data on the content of online ads, television spots, survey data and coding of media coverage, we examine several indirect measure of YouTube s influence on election outcomes. Our findings indicate that online advertising matters. First, when asked to describe a campaign ad, some people recall online-only ads. Online video use is positively associated with ad recall at the individual level, and how often ads are recalled in the aggregate depends on how much exposure they had online. News media coverage of ads posted online, however, is dwarfed by coverageof television advertising. Paper prepared for the annual meeting of the Western Political Science Association, March 22-24, 2012, Portland, Oregon. 1

2 Political Advertising in the 21st Century: The Influence of the YouTube Ad The Internet has undoubtedly destabilized many of the features of the analog world that we once took for granted. The ease with which we can now communicate across vast distances to audiences that were formerly inaccessible to any one of us has fundamentally changed how our culture operates. The effective decentralization of the communications architecture that was once uniformly controlled by a few large corporations has made the role of the mass media in our lives vastly different than it was just a few years ago. One area in which these changes are keenly felt is in the realm of politics. Although modern elections are still fought primarily on the airwaves, many potential voters are spending less time in front of their televisions and more time taking in news content online. With increasing consumer use of online platforms, the strategies employed by politicians seeking office have been forced to change with them as well. Modern election campaigns must now wage war on two fronts; one traditional (television), and the other very new (online). The interplay between these spheres, however, is poorly understood. The fundamental medium of political communication from campaigns to voters, even in this changing world, is the advertisement. Campaigns typically craft 30- or 60-second television spots to concisely inform voters of candidates policy positions, background stories, and points of contention with their opponents. With the rise of the Internet, however, and with the concomitant decline of the unidirectional model of broadcasting, campaigns are increasingly looking for additional ways to get their messages out. However, little is known about the content and reach of the newer forms of advertising emerging to meet these challenges, such as that which occurs on, and is distributed through, YouTube. YouTube provides an ideal venue for analyzing and comprehending some of these issues. It is one of the primary digital media by which modern campaigns communicate with voters, and it provides a dialogical environment in which voters can and do contest the messages of the campaigns by producing their own videos to communicate directly with other voters. Individuals or other non-campaign groups routinely remix and subvert campaign-produced content to challenge the message of the campaigns, thereby radically altering the advertising landscape. For these reasons, YouTube, in many respects, is the beating heart of politics on the web. YouTube also has potentially significant effects on traditional media outlets. To the extent that both the campaigns and individual YouTube users make news happen through and on YouTube, the major broadcast networks and newspapers are forced to pay attention to it as both a competitor and a space in which newsmakers act. Thus, there is every reason to believe that YouTube may help to set the news agenda as much as it surely reacts to events reported in the media. Regardless of the extent to which these relationships exist, it is clear that in order to understand the changes brought about by the advent of the Internet in both the practice of electoral politics and in terms of the relationship between politics and traditional media, it is essential to look at the ways in which YouTube mediates exchanges of information and sets public agendas. In light of these changes--and the central place that YouTube occupies in structuring the relationship between voters, campaigns, and media--our inquiry aims to assess the influence of YouTube advertising on the electorate. We to gauge this by looking at four basic questions. First, we assess YouTube s potential impact is by examining how often online ads are viewed. For online ads to have any impact at all, they must be seen. As exposure to messages 2

3 about a candidate increases, the more familiar voters become with that candidate. This matters because familiarity can be an important heuristic for vote choice (Lau and Redlawsk 2006). Next, we identify and describe the characteristics of ads that make certain advertisements popular, and therefore potentially persuasive. Because YouTube is a medium of self-selection, if we can learn what types of ads people want to see we, we can better understand what kinds of ads have influenced voters in the past, and what kinds of ads people will be likely to view in the future. Third, in order to assess the potential power of ads to influence behavior, we assess the propensity for online advertising to be recalled by citizens after they have viewed it. By examining what ads people remembered, and by looking for commonalities in the types of ads that people recall, we can show what types of political advertisement have the greatest ability to stick in the minds of voters. Finally, we ask whether ads posted online have the ability to affect the news media s agenda. There is reason to believe that more traditional news media amplify the messages of ads that are popular online. This coverage, in turn, can drive online views of those ads, stimulate word-of-mouth discussion of the ads and their message, and drastically increase the number of people who are brought into contact with the ad s message. This also raises questions about the degree to which candidates can control their own messages in a digital world, and the capacity of individual citizens, through YouTube, to potentially shape the regional or national conversation. Although we do not solve the problem of measuring the influence of online political messaging in this research, we do employ several approaches that allow us to get at the question more fully than has been achieved in previous research. These approaches include an examination of what types of videos get viewed online, which types of videos are recalled by citizens, and how online political messaging can set the traditional news media s agenda. Ultimately, we conclude that although their influence in the 2010 races for Congress, governor and Senate was not overwhelming, online ads were fairly prevalent and did register in the minds of citizens but had some difficulty in setting the agenda of the news media. Defining Political Advertising Before proceeding, we need to specify exactly what we mean by political advertising. We are interested only in studying digital videos that have been posted online, not the older banner ad studied by Cornfield and Kaye (2009). Importantly, we want to study both traditional 30- second ads designed for television that have been posted online as well as more recent, nontraditional forms of advertising as well, so-called YouTube ads. To qualify as an ad, and consequently to be included in our sample, the video must satisfy two criteria. First, it must make an attempt to persuade the viewer, that is, to convince him or her to vote for or against a candidate. Second, it must be produced or edited in some way. For the purposes of our definition, we take persuasion to mean any attempt on the part of the producer to change the behavior of the viewer by influencing the viewer s thinking or emotional state. The producer s intent is the determining factor in deciding whether or not persuasion is occurring, and can include oral arguments, nonverbal cues, or visual symbolism designed to evoke a cognitive or affective response. We took edited to mean that the producer has made conscious choices about what content to include (and what to exclude) aimed at fulfilling a specific discursive objective relevant to the campaign. Edited videos often depict portions of real events, such as campaign rallies, speeches, etc., or selections from network television broadcasts (e.g. interviews, coverage 3

4 of primary results). By scripted, we simply mean the action in the video is directed by the producer or the dialogue was written in advance by the producer in an attempt to persuade. Granted, this is an expansive definition of what an advertisement is. However, in order to catalog and comprehend the range of potentially new phenomena in the world of online advertising, it is best to begin with an inclusive definition. Indeed, the range of content posted online by campaigns, interest groups, and citizens challenges our basic conceptions of what an advertisement looks like in fundamental ways. Politics on YouTube Why look at YouTube? Simply put, YouTube is the dominant outlet for online video content, and therefore a central hub for the distribution of advertisements. Although other videosharing sites exist (such as Vimeo or DailyMotion), YouTube is by far the most widely used. Indeed, as of January 2012, YouTube was the third most accessed website in the world, behind only Google and Facebook. YouTube accounted for 60 percent of the videos watched online in 2006 (Gueorguieva 2009, p. 235). The idea behind YouTube is that anybody, anywhere in the world, can upload video content about almost anything they like (Salmond 2010). As Salmond notes, prior to YouTube s launch in 2005, it was quite expensive for people to post videos online, as posters were charged for the amount of Internet bandwidth that their videos used. This made it so that only those with financial resources usually business firms could put video online. Even then, fast Internet connections and expensive hardware requirements made streaming video either impossible or impractical for most Internet users. YouTube, however, encouraged both the production and consumption of online video. By dramatically lowering the cost of disseminating video, it created the potential for any user to produce content and have it viewed by millions of other users (Grossman, 2006). This was further facilitated by the rapidly dropping price of digital video equipment around the time YouTube emerged (Manovich 2009). The proliferation of cellphone cameras and the emergence of new devices (such as Flip Video and advanced digital still cameras) constructed around new, cheap flash memory made it possible for a large number of people to produce video. Technical and physical barriers to access have grown progressively smaller in the years since. According to Madden (2007), 57 percent of adult Internet users use YouTube for either viewing or uploading video content, and 19 percent do so on an average day. Users with highspeed Internet connections at home and work are even more avid. Seventy-four percent of these users watch or download video online. Grossman (2012) notes that each minute, more than 60 minutes of video are posted to YouTube. YouTube is a technology that has arrived, and is playing a part in many of our lives. Given that YouTube is a mainstream source of content today, it is no surprise that political campaigns have turned to YouTube with the intention of gaining more exposure for their ads. According to Williams and Gulati (2007), 72 percent of Senate candidates and 28 percent of House candidates had established YouTube channels prior to the November 2006 elections. Similarly, all of the major presidential candidates in 2008 had channels, and uploaded significant quantities of video. The Obama campaign alone posted some 1900 ads in 2008 (Ridout, Fowler, and Branstetter 2010). Not only are candidates posting to YouTube, but potential voters are watching. Smith and Rainie (2008) show that 27 percent of Internet users have watched speeches or announcements by candidates online, 26 percent have watched online videos of interviews with candidates, and a further 25 percent have watched campaign-related 4

5 videos that did not come from a news organization or from the campaigns themselves. Towner and Dulio (2012) agree with the assessment in the popular press that 2008 was truly the first YouTube election. Given that YouTube is now being used for political purposes, the question remains what its effects on political behavior are, and whether those effects are different from those of traditional media. There is no shortage of speculation about the Internet s influence on behavior going back to the mid 1990s (Grossman 1995, Negroponte 1996, and Browning 1995, Mayer 1994, Graber 1996). In more recent academic and journalistic literature, a number of claims seem to have become part of the conventional wisdom on Internet politics, all of which would greatly affect the impact and meaning of advertising on the web. Generally, it is believed that the web helps to engage new populations in contributing to the political debate (Williams and Gulati 2007), makes money less relevant to political speech (Feldman 2006, Trippi 2008) and enhances popular sovereignty by making elected officials more accountable to the public (Lizza 2006, Bedard 2010, Schacter 2009). YouTube is particularly implicated in these speculations, given its dialogical character and its openness. Heldman (2007) contends that YouTube could enable candidates with relatively few economic and social resources to better compete with their better-funded rivals. Howard Dean s Internet-mediated successes in 2004 campaign for the Democratic nomination serve as the empirical justification for this line of argument. Dean used the Internet to generate a broad and vigorous base of online support before the campaign had mobilized many economic resources (Trippi 2008). Gueorguieva (2009) echoes this line of argument when she hypothesizes that YouTube might lower the cost of political advertising dramatically. This notion is validated in Carlson and Strandberg s (2008) study of the 2007 elections in Finland, which found that 8 of the 10 most popular videos featured candidates running for small political parties, giving them an opportunity to reach a wider audience. Moreover, electioneering on YouTube may appeal to segments of the population that traditionally have not been involved in politics. This is a hypothesis echoed by many journalistic observers as well (Keen 2006, Kerbel and Bloom 2006, Friedman 2005). Particular emphasis is placed on the potential to include young people, as they not only have typically been less politically engaged than older citizens (Young 2008; Mindich, 2005; Wattenberg 2007) but the so-called millennial generation also tend to use the web more frequently than people in generation X (or older) (Lenhart et al 2010). According to Smith and Rainie (2008) the web was as important a news source as television for young people, which has serious implications for campaigns which primarily interact with voters through television. Along these lines, Ricke (2010) found that the YouTube debate in 2008 drew substantial numbers of traditionally disengaged voters, especially minorities and young people. This suggests that behavior is affected in new ways by the availability of the Internet. Furthermore, although a digital divide may still exist, as Internet use has spread and become mainstream within the culture generally, Internet use among certain minority groups and marginalized communities is increasing (Smith 2010). This penetration seems to create pathways for new populations to engage with and be engaged in politics. Indeed, even beyond the demographic effects, Tolbert and McNeil (2003) find that not only are Internet users are more likely to vote, but they are more likely to be engaged in other forms of political participation, possibly because of greater information exposure. A third potential impact of YouTube politics is that candidates and traditional media outlets stand to lose control of the campaign agenda. One way this occurs is through the 5

6 influence of citizen journalists. The archetypal example of this phenomenon comes from the 2006 U.S. Senate campaign in Virginia, when candidate George Allen called a tracker for the opposing campaign a macaca, an ethnic slur. The incident was caught on tape, and widely circulated on YouTube. Anstead and Chadwick (2009) argue that this incident directly caused Allen s loss. Karpf (2008) suggests that it is likely that these maccaca moments, which he defines as political gaffes that are heavily accessed through YouTube will become more frequent. He suspects that these incidents can lead cascades of media and public attention with noticeable impacts on electoral campaigns (2008, p. 84). Karpf also argues, however, that these moments are not necessarily driven by citizen journalist[s] with a cause and a camera but by political elites acting instrumentally (2008, p. 104). The situation is further complicated when campaign videos can be altered, parodied, combined with other videos, or critiqued by everyday people (Heldman 2007). In this scenario, the voice of the campaign might become but one of many possible voices heard because of not only subversion of campaign-produced videos but competition from usergenerated content and widespread public evaluation of that content. Winograd and Hais noted that in 2006 user-generated content suddenly became a far more potent campaign weapon that the slick ads created by media consultants (2007 p. 133). Grossman (2006) finds similar effects. Savoie (2008) notes the highly individuating nature of participation in dialogical interactions online, and observes a unique potential for creative discourse in this mode which is enabled by YouTube. Robertson, Vatrapu, and Medina (2010) describe the relationships between Facebook and YouTube, and highlight the rhetorical and bi-directionally discursive uses to which hyperlinked video content is often put. According to Klotz, YouTube inspires participation from ordinary citizens dissatisfied with professional approaches to politics (2010, p. 111). Web 2.0 s bidirectional information flows seem to destabilize the old top-down model of campaign communication mediated by the mainstream analog media. Stallings- Carpenter (2010) even claims that The proliferation of online campaign content has brought an end to an era of broadcast media dominance over US national politics. (p. 1). Although the Internet certainly seems to have thrown up several provocative instances of technologically-mediated challenges to the hegemony of traditional campaigns and the mainstream press, it is probably too early to conclude that the hypothesized revolution has been realized. Margolis and Resnick (2000) observe as early as the year 2000 that old models of the relationship between media and politics were already reproducing themselves on the web. Although the web has brought changes to the practice of campaigning, many campaigns simply aim to integrate digital technologies to enhance their standard operations (Howard 2005). And campaigns seem largely to approach YouTube as another outlet for standard models of communication, using the usual range of advertisements and standard types of appeals (Bruns and Saunders 2007). That was the conclusion of Klotz s (2010) systematic investigation of the most popular videos having to do with the 2006 and 2008 U.S. Senate races. By and large, online political advertising closely resembled offline political advertising. The most popular videos (9 of 12 in 2008) were produced by the candidates and political parties, not by actors new to the political advertising game. The other top videos consisted of an interest group ad, a floor speech and a press conference clip. In summary, content produced by ordinary citizens was rare and undistinguished in 2008 (Klotz, p. 152). Likewise, Ridout, Fowler, and Branstetter (2010) found that overwhelmingly, the major producers of political ads on the web in the 2008 election cycle were the political campaigns themselves. User-generated content 6

7 accounted for a meager 2.1% of the total number of political ads generated during that election cycle. Some criticize the gatekeeping function that YouTube performs. Although YouTube is often described as a democratic forum, Marwick (2007) shows how structural factors strongly influence what is popular and criticizes the use of the word democratic when referring to the rise and fall of popular videos. This gatekeeping function is worth bearing in mind when one considers the relationship between campaigns, traditional media, and web 2.0. A confluence of interests mediates the dynamics of the media agendas, campaign discourse, and video popularity. Rather than the web being a simple democratic commons, there is a highly complex relationship between the web, traditional media, and campaigns with a real mutual dependence which structures the function of each. Robertson, et al., (2008) show how one digital medium on the web, such as YouTube, rarely operates in isolation from others (like Facebook or blogs). Nowhere is this clearer than in the phenomenon of the viral video. Wallsten (2010) finds that it is not simply word of mouth that drives the distribution of viral political content. Boynton (2008) disputes that the viral label is even appropriate given the patterns of distribution that he observes, in that rather than spreading simply from peer to peer, there seem to be external events that drive transmission. There is a complex interrelation of blogs, campaign statements, and traditional media that leads these videos to spread. Wallsten (2010) concludes that traditional media, although they often report on video activity, do not drive the viewing of video (although they certainly increase views). He finds that traditional media are reactive to large numbers of views, rather than generative of them, in part because they respond to blogs, which are more sensitive to web-based phenomena. This thesis is complicated, however, by the symbiosis that has emerged between blogs and standard print or broadcast sources in terms of the agenda-setting function. There seems to be evidence that both web sources and print sources can influence what appears in each domain. Haas (2005) found that many bloggers do not do much actual reporting, and mainly rely on traditional journalistic sources for information. This was corroborated by Adamic and Glance (2005) and Reese, Rutigliano, Hyun, and Jeong (2007) who show that traditional news outlets occupy a major proportion of the links contained on many political blogs. At the same time, however, blogs have a profound effect on mainstream media agendas (Smolkin (2004), Tewksbury and Rittenberg (2009), and Wallsten (2007). Not only does today s journalist regularly locate stories through trolling blogs, but any subject that garners substantial online buzz becomes valid for mainstream media. Graber (2009) has shown that viral videos can meet the usual standards of newsworthiness, and are therefore likely to intrude into the agendas of both the blogosphere and mainstream media. Given that the news media provide substantial coverage of televised political advertising (Ridout and Smith 2008; Fowler and Ridout 2009), it would not be surprising that this focus would extend to Internet ads as well. Crucially, the campaigns themselves have a crucial role to play in promoting a video and causing it to go viral (to the extent that this term is valid). Indeed, Haynes and Pitts (2009) suggest that views of websites and YouTube channels are very sensitive to campaign developments, which is something mediated by news media. The Yes We Can video, which was so widely viewed as part of Obama s 2008 campaign, was actively supported by the campaign organization itself in a variety of ways. Wallsten (2010) argues that [w]hen a large number of people watch an online political video, therefore, bloggers, journalists, and campaign members are all likely to start talking about the video because each actor sees it as a way to further his or her own goals. 7

8 Although YouTube may seem to serve as a nexus for web politics in a number of dimensions, there are a number of complicating factors that may diminish its importance. First, the bottom line remains that although many people have used the web for political ends, politics is far fromyoutube s primary function. Comedy videos have become the most widely viewed genre of online video, surpassing news (Purcell 2010). And learning about politics is far from the most common use of the web (Hindman 2009). Bimber (1998) argued that the use of the web for political purposes remained limited simply because people were not very interested in politics. Although his analysis is now dated, the basic argument remains sound, and is true offline as well as on the web. Even for those users who do use the web for political ends, it is often not used dialogically, or even very interactively. Most users are content to passively consume the information available. Manovich (2009) says that in 2007, only between 0.5 percent and 1.5 percent of users on YouTube, Flickr and Wikipedia contributed their own content. Relatedly, Church (2010) suggests that YouTube might encourage only passive engagement with candidates, rather than strong participatory or deliberative interaction. Regardless of whether there is dialogical debate going on, no one can deny that web content is different at least in the sense that it is self-selected. This fact may be changing the nature of political debate in new ways. Towner and Dulio (2012), Sunstein 2001, Baumgartner and Morris 2009, Tewksbury and Rittenberg (2009), and Howard (2005) are all concerned about the potential for increased fragmentation and polarization of views caused by self-selecting only information that conforms to preexisting views or the capacity of campaigns to micro-target potential voters with information that will support those views. Bimber (1998) expected expanded pluralism, but not necessarily outright fragmentation of political beliefs and engagement. The bottom line remains that the precise effects of web-mediated political communication on political behavior are poorly known. The interplay between YouTube videos, traditional media, and the campaigns needs to be clarified, and the effect of the media that come out of those relationships on voters needs to be assessed. To that end, we now turn to a more concrete analysis of these relationships in the 2010 congressional elections. Data In order to investigate these relationships, we built a sample of YouTube political advertisements using a web-based program called ContextMiner ( (Shah 2009). ContextMiner is a web-based crawler that collects information about videos posted on YouTube, and updates that information daily. This includes information about the number of times each video was viewed and its duration. On the ContextMiner website, we entered the name of all major party general election U.S. Senate candidates running for office in 2010, beginning our search on August 24, We asked the program to collect data on the 100 most relevant videos associated with each candidate s name, and that information was updated daily. As new videos were posted during the campaign, they were added to our sample in real time. After assembling a list of URLs, we were able to download the videos from YouTube using a python script called TubeKit (Shah 2010). TubeKit allowed us to overcome a longstanding problem in research on YouTube: the ephemeral nature of videos that are posted, withdrawn, edited, or blocked. Previous research has been hampered by the inability to maintain access to all of the relevant materials sampled. We ultimately collected information on almost 5,500 videos. We then took a randomly-selected sample of 20 percent of those videos to code. After eliminating some videos that did not meet our definition 8

9 of an ad, we were left with a sample of 776 online ads. 1 Coders then classified each ad as to its tone (positive, negative or contrast), 2 whether it made an appeal to humor and its sponsorship. We defined sponsorship by asking who was responsible for the production of a given video. That is, sponsorship is not simply a matter of financing; it also implies control over the content of the ad. While most categories of sponsorship are reasonably self-explanatory (a candidate s organization, a political party, an interest group, an individual), we did discover what appears to be a new type of actor in political advertising that has no comparison in the universe of television advertising. What we called quasi-political organizations are distinguished by their ambiguous political character. That is, they are organizations (i.e., groups of individuals in possession of a budget or revenue stream that allows for web-video production) producing videos with political relevance and apparent persuasive intent that is not necessarily aligned in a fixed way with any candidate, ideology, or party. Their primary organizational objective is not to intervene in politics, but they sometimes produce persuasive political content. One particular example is the organization barelypolitical.com. Barelypolitical.com is a satire website, primarily focused on entertaining viewers and drawing a large number of hits on its website to generate revenue. In the 2008 election cycle, however, many of its videos appeared to have a pro-obama orientation and were potentially very persuasive. Another example of a quasipolitical organization is a news-oriented site that is generally neutral, yet still occasionally produces editorial content. Music groups which produce politically-oriented music videos especially for the election would be considered quasi-political organizations as well. Any group that has aims other than political influence, yet chooses to intervene or editorialize through the deployment of an ad may be considered a quasi-political sponsor. In addition, we collected data on coverage of political advertising in 2010 from thirteen U.S. Senate races, all but two of the races ranked in the top two competitiveness tiers by CQ. 3 For each of the thirteen races, we identified the top two circulating newspapers in the state available through LexisNexis, Factiva, or ProQuest, and we searched for all articles printed between September 1 and Election Day 2010 that mentioned one of the candidates running for office and political advertising. 4 We collected 548 articles from the 26 sources identified in the appendix. A human coder then took over and eliminated duplicates, articles that did not mention political advertising, including some that contained phrases such as ad hoc or ad libbed, along with a few stories that discussed candidates in other states. The analysis presented here is from the 322 remaining stories mentioning or focusing on advertising across the 13 races. 1 We were unable to code some videos because they were private videos that ContextMiner was able to track but that we were not authorized to view. We are not too concerned about this biasing our sample because these videos likely had few viewers given that private videos are restricted to only those specific viewers whom the poster authorizes. There were also a small number of videos that we were unable to code because the video had been taken down even before out downloading was able to begin. 2 Coders were asked: In your judgment, is the primary purpose of the ad to promote a specific candidate, attack a candidate, or contrast the candidates? 3 We do not have data from West Virginia, which was rated as a toss-up, nor Connecticut s race. The Arkansas race was the only one included that was ranked by CQ as a lean (Republican). 4 Our specific search was: (ad OR advert* OR video) AND (Candidate1Name OR Candidate2Name OR Candidate3Name) AND senate. 9

10 We supplemented our database of online advertising with tracking data about when and where the political candidates were airing their ads offline in These data, from the Wesleyan Media Project, reveal an abundance of information about each ad airing on broadcast television during 2010 U.S. Senate campaigns. This allows us to know the television program during which and the media market in which each campaign ad aired. We can thus compare the influence of exposure to advertising both online and offline Finally, in assessing the impact of advertising videos online, we rely upon survey data in which respondents were asked to recall a political ad from the 2010 campaigns in their state. The online survey (N=1000), conducted by YouGov in late December 2010, 5 asked: Thinking about the 2010 campaign in your state, please describe a political ad that comes to mind. A coder then went through each description to try to match it with one of the ads in our database. This survey also asked respondents to evaluate the U.S. Senate candidates in their state. Results To provide a little context, we first examined the sponsorship of the advertising in our sample (Table 1). The most common sponsor we identified was the candidates campaigns, accounting for 33 percent of the ads in our sample. Private citizens created 27 percent of the ads, while interest groups accounting or 17 percent. Quasi-political organizations, such as BraveNewFilms, TalkingPointsMemo, and Conservative New Media, sponsored 14 percent of the ads. [Table 1 here] The first step in attempting to quantify the influence of online ads is to understand how often the ads in our sample were viewed and what types of ads were more likely to be viewed. Table 2 shows the mean, median and maximum number of video views by ad sponsor. By and large, there are not dramatic differences across sponsors in the ability of their ads to attract viewers. That said, it appears that parties had the most success in attracting viewers to their videos; on average, their videos attracted just under 10,000 views. Candidate ads attracted 4,586 views on average, just above the number of views of ads sponsored by quasi-political organizations. Videos sponsored by private citizens had, on average, 3,626 views, while interestgroup ads attracted 2,800 viewers. The most watched ad in our sample was the Demon Sheep ad with over 300,000 views. Released online, the ad attacked Republican Senate primary election candidate Tom Campbell on behalf of his Republican rival, Carly Fiorina. [Table 2 here] When gauging potential influence, however, it might be useful to think of the total number of exposures to videos on YouTube. The ads in our 20 percent sample were viewed a total of 3.12 million times. If one were to extrapolate, that comes to million views across all Senate races, or 422,000 views for each of the 37 Senate races in While certainly a substantial number, it likely does not match the number of ad impressions that people received from their television screens. 5 YouGov interviewed 1135 respondents who were then matched down to a sample of 1000 to produce the final dataset. The respondents were matched on gender, age, race, education, party identification, ideology, and political interest. YouGov then weighted the matched set of survey respondents to known marginals for the general population of the United States from the 2006 American Community Survey. 10

11 Are certain types of ads more likely to be viewed? Table 3 suggests yes. The average attack ad was seen over three times as many times as the average positive ad, with viewership of contrast ads falling in between. It seems that viewers found attacks much more compelling or those who were linking to ads found them to be more compelling. Interestingly, attack ads made up 32 percent of our sample, with contrast ads making up another 19.5 percent. This distribution of tone is quite different from earlier findings about the relative absence of negativity online in 2008 the presidential race (Ridout, Fowler and Branstetter 2010). Only 9 percent of online ads examined in that race were negative, with another 9 percent contrast. [Table 3 here] We also might think that ads that contain humor would be more like to catch on and be recommended or forwarded on to friends. And so we examined the relationship between the presence of humor in an ad (about 7.5 percent of the ads in our sample contained humor) and the number of views it attracted. We found that ads containing humor had an average of 5,153 views compared to 3,460 views of ads that had no appeals to humor. It appears that humor, then, does work to draw viewership to online advertising. Ad length was another factor that we wanted to consider, with the expectation that shorter videos would be more likely to be watched given Americans short attention spans. To a large degree, this proved to be true, as Table 4 shows. Ads seconds in length attracted the most views, on average, with declining viewership as the length of the ad increased. The only disruption to this pattern is provided by very short ads, those of 29 seconds or fewer in length, which attracted a very small number of viewers. Perhaps ads this short just are not substantial enough for people to bother calling attention to them. It is also unclear to what extent people are watching the longer videos in their entirety even after they click on them. [Table 4 here] In short, it appears that certain types of online ads are more likely to attract viewers than others. Our initial evidence suggests that ads sponsored by parties, those that contain attacks, those that are relatively short (30-59 seconds in length) and those that contain humor are the most viewed. But do these relationships hold when we control for all of these factors simultaneously? We thus estimated an ordinary least squares regression model predicting the logged number of times each ad was watched. We logged the dependent variable because its distribution was strongly skewed. Our predictors included the sponsor of the ad (a candidate, party, interest group, citizen or quasi-political organization, with other groups omitted), the tone of the ad (whether it was positive or contrast, with negative omitted), whether the ad contained humor, and dummy variables indicating the length of the ad. Table 5, which shows the model estimates, reveals several predictors of an ad s viewership. Candidate-sponsored ads are significantly more likely to be viewed than ads sponsor by other entities, and extremely short ads (less than 30 seconds in length) are less likely to viewed than ads over 5 minutes in length. Moreover, the tone of the ad had an important impact on viewership, with contrast ads and positive ads especially much less likely to be viewed than negative ads. Perhaps surprisingly, humorous ads were no more or less likely to be viewed than ads that contained no humor. [Table 5 here] In sum, online ads received substantial numbers of views during the 2010 U.S. Senate campaigns, and certain types of ads were more likely to be viewed than others. But this really only tells us that advertising online has a potential influence on the electorate. Thus, in assessing the impact of these ads, we looked at two additional things. First, are these ads having an impact 11

12 on the decisions that voters make? We cannot assess this directly, but we can examine which ads people recall. Second, how successful are these ads posted online in setting the news media s agenda? Ad Recall To assess the ability of ads to sink in, we asked people to recall an ad that aired in their state. Forty-five percent indicated they could not remember an ad, while about 12 percent recalled some advertising but not with enough clarity to be able to associate that ad with a candidate. Another 22 percent described an ad well enough that we could associate it with a specific candidate but not with a specific advertisement. Eleven percent of respondents described an ad that could be uniquely identified, and eleven percent gave an answer that was non-responsive to the question (such as a rant about politicians being crooks). In sum, about 45 percent of respondents were able to recall an advertisement with some degree of detail. This strikes us as a fairly high percentage given that respondents were asked to recall the ad about six weeks after Election Day. Which ads did they recall? By and large, the ads that they recalled were designed for television. The most recalled ad (cited by 12 people) was one aired on television by California gubernatorial candidate Jerry Brown against his Republican opponent Meg Whitman. The ad charged that Whitman would be an echo of the current governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger. The second most recalled ad, cited by 8 people, was one aired by Whitman. Her minute-long ad discussed Brown s 40-year history as a failed politician. The one exception to the rule that the most memorable ads were designed for television was the Demon Sheep ad mentioned earlier. The three-minute-long YouTube spot was mentioned by six respondents. Only one other onlineonly ad was cited by survey respondents: a video posted by the Republican National Committee that accused Arkansas Senator Blanche Lincoln of flip-flopping in her support of health care reform. Although they were not citing many online-only ads, there is another indication that people s recall was a result of online activity or media coverage of the ad, not direct television viewing. Of the 112 people who mentioned ads that we could uniquely identify, six disobeyed our instruction to describe advertising from their state and mentioned an ad aired in another state. Of those six, four mentioned the ad aired by Delaware Senate candidate Christine O Donnell in which she intoned I m not a witch in response to rumors that she had dabbled in witchcraft in college. There are two more ways in which we can examine the impact of advertising online using the survey recall data. First, we estimate a model predicting the extent to which citizens could recall an advertisement, setting those who could not remember an ad and those who gave nonresponsive answers to the recall question to 0 and everyone else to 1. 6 We predict recall as a function of the volume reported television use (ranging from 0-1), reported frequency of general Internet use (coded from 0-1), online video use (an index ranging from 0-1 that combines an individual s reported use of YouTube specifically along with reported frequency of watching online political videos, commenting on videos and forwarding links to online videos), competitiveness of the race and standard demographics. The results are displayed in Table 6. [Table 6 here] 6 If we also set those who gave an answer but not one with enough clarity to match it to a specific candidate to 0, the impact of online video use is even stronger. 12

13 We find that both reported television consumption and online video use are associated with the ability to recall an advertisement, controlling for internet use, party ID, ideology, sex, age, education and political competition. In short, it appears that television is not the only medium that aids individuals recall of political advertising. Second, we estimated a Poisson count model predicting the number of mentions of each ad we could identify that was mentioned by respondents in our database. This dependent variable ranged from 1 to 12. Predictors in the model included the number of times the ad was viewed on YouTube, the number of times the ad was aired on broadcast television (averaging across all media markets in which it was aired), and a measure of the population of the state in which the ad aired. 7 Our reasoning for including this last variable was that ads aired in larger states have more potential of being mentioned given that more people in those states show up as respondents in our survey, and so we wanted to control for this factor. Model estimates are presented in Table 7. [Table 7 here] First, we find that the number of times an ad aired on broadcast television was a positive and statistically significant (at the.10 level) predictor of an ad s being mentioned. Recall is better when an ad airs more often on television. But recall also improves the more times an ad is viewed on YouTube, suggesting that online ad viewership has an independent impact on ad recall. In sum, we have found reason to believe that exposure to advertising online matters. More frequent watching of online videos enhances people s ability to recall advertising at the individual level, and in the aggregate, the more times an ad is viewed online, the more likely it is to be mentioned. In the next section, we will explore how direct that impact is whether people recall the ad because they watched it online or whether their recall stems more from media coverage of ads that go viral online. Media Coverage of Advertising Our electronic newspaper searches of thirteen competitive U.S. Senate races revealed that advertising played a prominent role in media coverage. Of the 322 identified articles about Senate campaigns that mentioned campaign ads, nearly half (46 percent) of stories focused primarily on the ads in the race. Coverage of the Illinois Senate race contained the fewest stories containing advertising mentions, just three. However, all three stories focused on the ads explicitly. Perhaps unsurprisingly given the content of the ads, Kentucky s Senate race contained the highest number of stories discussing advertising (53 articles) with Nevada (36), Missouri (35), and New Hampshire (31) rounding out the second tier with more than 30 stories each. The percentage of stories mentioning advertising that focused explicitly on ad content ranged from more than a third (37 percent of all coverage in Arkansas race) to 100 percent in Illinois contest, and 80 percent in the Ohio race. By and large, our analysis of news coverage of advertising in 2010 suggests that YouTube ads did not warrant much news attention, let alone drive coverage. Despite the overwhelming coverage of advertising in these states, discussion of Internet ads was rare. Although three-quarters of all coverage mentioned a specific advertisement (stories contained an average mention of 1.2 ads with a range from 0 to 5 spots), only thirteen percent (41 stories) mentioned Internet advertising, videos or social media outreach/marketing by campaigns. 7 A few people mentioned ads aired in U.S. House races. For these ads, we included the population of the congressional district instead of the population of the state. 13

14 Mentions of Internet ads were highest in Florida s race (38 percent) followed by Illinois (33 percent) and lowest in Arkansas and Ohio (both with no mentions). Of the 324 references to individual ads in news coverage, the overwhelming majority (60 percent) were identified as running on air while only 6 percent (19 ad mentions) were noted as being an online spot (the remaining 34 percent were not identified within the story as being from a specific source or were unclear). We uncovered a wide variety of specific ads mentioned (160 different ones), but the majority (57 percent) received only a single mention with another quarter receiving only two mentions. Only twelve ads received four or more mentions. These are described in Table 8. [Table 8 here] The table reveals a few important things. First, all of the most mentioned ads were ads that were designed to be played on television. Seven of the top twelve were traditional 30- second ads, the only exception being the Kentucky Democratic Party s 60-second ad that aired the two days before Election Day. One of the top three ads, a spot from Missouri s Robin Carnahan that featured FOX News questioning of her opponent s commitment to reform, was unavailable on YouTube due to a lawsuit by FOX News over use of its content. Second, the top ads mentioned by the news media were not necessarily those that attracted a lot of viewers. For instance, although the press paid much attention to an Arkansas ad about Senate candidate John Boozman s history as a football player, mentioning it six times, the video was viewed on YouTube fewer than 400 times. To gauge more systematically how YouTube views and television airings relate to media mentions of specific ads, we estimated a truncated Poisson model predicting the number of mentions of individual ads in news media as a function of ad airings, YouTube views, tone and humor appeals. [Table 9 here] As Table 9 shows, both the number of television airings and the number of YouTube views were positively associated with more media coverage of the ads. Interestingly, negative and contrast ads were no more likely to be covered than positive ads, but the likelihood of news media covering advertising greatly increased if an ad attempted to be humorous. In short, although ads created specifically for online audiences did not drive news coverage, views of videos online are associated with higher media coverage. Conclusion Our investigation into the potential influence of online advertising offers a mixed picture. On the one hand, online ads generate substantial attention. Negative ads are particularly popular. They account for only one third of the online ad content, but also generate more than half of the viewership. Furthermore, online video use is associated with recall at both the individual and advertisement levels, even after controlling for television use and number of ad airings on television. All this suggests that the YouTube ad is influential. On the other hand, our media analysis suggests that at least in the case of the 2010 U.S. Senate races, a discussion of television spots dominated the news media agenda. Online views were associated with more media coverage, but it is unclear whether media coverage drove viewership or the other way around. Our findings speak to a number of important questions that have arisen in the literature, and give us some purchase on answering the broader issue about YouTube s influence on electoral politics. First, our results show that online ads garner substantial attention, with party sponsored advertising leading the pack in terms of video views. Candidate and quasi-political 14

15 organizations were the second and third leading producers of online ad content. Private citizens, however, also played a role. Interestingly, it was a private citizens video which had the highest maximum number of view, although the mean number of views for the category relatively low. This pattern of viewership may offer some confirmation of the accounts advanced by Hindman (2010) and Benkler (2006) about the existence of a so-called long tail model of content consumption and production. In this account, only a few notable sites (or videos) get caught up in aggregating cycles which generate large numbers of views. For content that is not aggregated to the highest levels of distribution, reasonable levels of dissemination still occur among narrower communities. Thus, our data offer some reason to doubt the claim that usergenerated content is simply ignored. Indeed, this does appear to suggest that although campaigns and parties remain the primary drivers in terms of setting the agenda of campaign discourse, private citizens are nonetheless intervening in the discussion in a quantitatively significant way that was not possible in the era of traditional media models. The fact that party-sponsored ads were more frequently viewed than candidate-sponsored ads is perhaps in need of explanation. One strong possibility is that party-sponsored ads were more controversial or inflammatory than candidate produced content. The strategy of using surrogates to distance negative ads from the candidate is well-established, and this mechanism reflects our finding that attack ads are more frequently viewed than less negative forms of advertising. Indeed, we found that negative ads posted to YouTube account for 32.6 percent of online ads but garner more 55 percent of the viewership. Negative candidate sponsored ads were the category of advertising that generated the highest number of views. This finding supports the hypothesis of Clark-Pingley (2011), which contends that campaigns place greater emphasis on negativity on the web. The reason for this finding is not provided conclusively by our data, but it is possible to imagine several reasons why it might be so. First, because YouTube is a selfselected environment, visitors to candidate s YouTube content may already be partisan for that candidate. It is possible that those partisan visitors gain stronger confirmation of their existing opinions, or at least previously unknown (and therefore more interesting) information, from attacks on the opposing candidate. However, while self-selection may contribute to the dynamics we observed, we have not been able to test this hypothesis concretely. Similarly, another issue that we have not explored in detail is the possibility of qualitative differences between negative content online and negative content in traditional media. It is possible that negative content online is more controversial, more original, or somehow more engaging than traditional attack ads. This may be part of a strategy on the part of campaigns to keep negativity confined to the web. Just as candidates distance themselves from strong attacks by using surrogates to deliver these controversial messages, they may be distancing themselves from their most unorthodox and risky content by placing it on the web. Web content, as has been suggested, is possibly more likely to be viewed by already sympathetic self-selectors and therefore less likely to cause controversy among that group of viewers. Likewise, because web content is likely viewed by fewer people than television advertising, it is perceived to be less likely to do damage if a negative ad goes over the line on the web. Thus, the more controversial and more discussion-worthy ads may be being placed online and therefore generating higher viewership. Further research is necessary to test this hypothesis, however. Even if online video use is less frequently viewed than television content, our data show that it is nonetheless influential. Online ads are associated with recall both at the level of the individual and the level of the advertisement, even after controlling for television use and the 15

16 number of ad airings on television. This indicates that the YouTube ad has the capacity to remain in the minds of potential voters and potentially shape the outcome of elections. This finding is in harmony with the numerous statistics that show that web use is consistently cutting into the share of time people spend consuming media currently occupied by television. Although we remain unable to separate the influence of web ads from the influence of traditional media content, we can say that people are both watching and remembering YouTube advertising. Although web content appears to be influential, our media analysis suggests that at least in the case of the 2010 U.S. Senate races, traditionally designed television spots dominated the news media agenda. Web-specific content did not drive discussions of advertising in the traditional media. Furthermore, our findings that much of the content found on the web was originally produced for television, and that television airings still seem to be significant drivers of the number of recall mentions that an ad receives, confirm this conclusion. Part of the reason that traditional media tend to focus on television content may have to do with perceptions about the relative influence of television content versus the influence of web ads, as well as perceptions about the size of the viewership of television versus web ads. That is, traditional newspapers may be more focused on covering television ads because they perceive it to be more important for the outcome of the election. They may also find it more newsworthy because they believe more of their readers are likely to recognize it, and therefore be interested in seeing more about the ad in print. Or reporters may, as they often do, be deferring to elite politicians to set the agenda as opposed to letting news start from non-traditional political actors. Nonetheless, this finding about the lack of news coverage of online advertising was somewhat surprising given the various examples of online videos that entered into popular discussion during the 2008 election cycle. The Obama Girl video, John McCain s Celebrity ad featuring Paris Hilton, Hillary Clinton s 3 a.m. ad, and Will.i.Am of the Black Eye d Peas Yes, We Can videos all come to mind. One possible reason for this difference has to do with the scale of the potential audiences for each ad. In the national presidential contest, ad content was targeted to audiences 100 times larger, in diverse geographic locations, and concerned with issues of significance to all of the targeted voters. In Senate contests, regional, or even local issues are often important, making ads less relevant across state boundaries, or even sometimes within states themselves. It is also possible that Senate races use online video in a less sophisticated manner than we saw in 2008, and this made the 2010 content generally less newsworthy. Senate candidates, possessing less financial muscle and fewer staff resources, may have opted for traditional methods rather than making what they could have perceived as risky allocations of resources into new media. If true, this would contradict the observations of some previous research about less well-funded campaigns being more reliant on, or open to the web. More research will be necessary to determine why the traditional news media was not strongly influenced by web content, and why 2010 Senate ads never made larger cultural waves. In short, our data present a mixed picture of the influence online advertising. Although candidates certainly have turned to the web to distribute their advertising content, and viewers are also taking the time to view ads online, the traditional media has not been as strongly influenced by the emergence of the YouTube ad as some previous authors have suggested. Nonetheless, if present trends continue, the importance of the web for electoral politics will only increase. Our data show that web content is memorable, and therefore potentially influential. As more people trade an Internet connection for a newspaper subscription it will be important to continue investigating these issues. 16

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