Political advertising in the 2012 presidential election campaign

Media & Society

Media can have a strong influence on society. Media has the ability to shape how people view the world, how they perceive different issues and media can also have a direct influence on behavior in society as well. With political ads, the objective is direct behavioral influence, the behavior being voting, so the media role with these ads is a content-dependent relationship. The ads are intended to bring about a specific behavior, but the ads are also intended to change perspectives and dialogue, both about candidates and about the issues for which those candidates stand. This paper will examine two advertisements from the 2012 Presidential election campaign, one from each side, in order to illustrate this concept.

Cognitive/Affective/Behavioral

The Romney ad "Stand up to China" works primarily on the affective level. The copy of the ad is hilariously childish to anybody who understands anything about foreign policy or economics, so it certainly has little cognitive appeal, and indeed there is no authoritative substance to the ad at all, using random quotes for nobody worth remembering to support the point. The affective element plays on a few elements -- racism, fear of Communism and fear over one's economic stability (the jobs thing) in order to stir up the idea that Obama is not a strong enough leader. The implication is that Romney would actually be different, which is why this ad in particularly ironic, given Romney's history of outsourcing American jobs to China. So the ad at this point seeks to create an affective response about Obama, rather than appealing to the cognitive. Placed in late September, it is too early to focus on the behavioral aspects and there was no push at the end to vote, so the behavioral message is only implied here.

Intended/unintended

The unintended element of the Obama ad's Swiss bank account quip was to undermine the credibility of some of the other parts of that ad, where Team Obama makes a halfway cognitive case for itself vs. Romney -- but engaging in fear of the rich stereotyping the ad finishes weakly, which was not the intended consequence. That finisher also makes this more of a reinforcing ad than anything that is going to change minds -- track record arguments can help to change minds, but stereotyping and name-calling serve mainly to reinforce.

Conclusion

I see these ads as being designed to fit into a larger series of ads. They both seem to be reinforcing in nature, however, which highlights the importance of getting your supporters out to vote rather than to actually change minds. Further, there is little behavioral element to these ads -- they are affective and somewhat cognitive in nature because they seek to help their candidates build momentum, even if just negative momentum against their opponent. Unfortunately, both ads suffer from bad copy that really undermines the effectiveness at changing the affective dimension of the audience -- reinforcement is the only possibility when you play to existing fears.

The magnitude of these ads is minimal, in that they form only a minor part of a larger narrative. In that they are inherently limited because they are only intended to hammer home one message out of many. In that way, both ads are seeking to become foundational for larger messages, and if an individual ad has an unintended message this will probably become buried in an avalanche of subsequent election ads.

I would consider myself to be less susceptible than most to media effects, a function of being raised in a media-savvy household. That said, I am definitely more susceptible to reinforcement messages than to change messages. To me, the 30-second or even 1-minute spot is probably not enough to introduce the material needed to affect my cognitive understanding of an issue. But it is enough time to get an emotional response which is far more likely to happen when appealing to my confirmation bias than trying to change one of my views.