Local election cards/image processing, Eyal Margolin, Olivier Fitosi/Flash 90
A new study conducted at the University of Cambridge examined more than 600 ads that dealt with 50 different political campaigns and tried to decide the question: how can Internet ads (Ads) be used with maximum efficiency and do they even have an effect when it comes to election campaigns?
The impact is measured by the gap between the candidates
The study found that advertisements can lead to a small but important change in public opinion.
This effect is measured in the range between 0.8 and 2.3 percent.
This means that if an advertising campaign is effective, it can cause more people, in that range, to decide to support the candidate or cause that the advertisement promotes.
For example, if before the campaign half of the people support a certain candidate, after the advertisement, the support can increase to 50.8% in the low case and 52.3% in the high case.
The study illustrates how advertisements can have a tangible, albeit limited, influence on people's voting decisions.
This effect, although seemingly small, can be politically significant, especially in close races where a small change in voter preferences can determine the outcome of the election.
Ask Al Gore.
The answer to the golden question
Ofer Nidm./PR
The researchers searched for an answer to the golden question: what makes a campaign successful?
Mentions of issues or facts about a candidate, negative or positive tone, and aesthetic choices, such as whether the ad shows voters in their daily lives or the candidate himself, they concluded that none of these parameters reliably predicts how to maximize ad effectiveness.
However, if they discovered the answer to the golden question - it would pay off for them in particular.
The researchers found that the best-performing ads were more than twice as effective as the average ad, so being able to predict what will resonate with voters is worth a lot of power and a lot of money.
Increasing the effectiveness of an ad can be significant when it comes to advertising campaigns that make a purchase on a large scale of ads (such as, for example, a presidential race in the world's most important power), since the advertisers will be able to get a double level of persuasion for their money.
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Why is it so hard?
The challenge in finding the most effective ad lies in the fact that the trends that appeared in one campaign will not always be relevant in the next campaign.
For example, problem-focused ads were more effective in 2018.
But in 2020, the successful ads in congressional and senate races were ones that focused on the (candidate's) character or biography.
Add to that demographic differences such as sex, age, marital status, ethnicity, occupation, political positions, and more, and you will understand why determining the extent of the impact of one election campaign or another in a comprehensive manner is almost impossible.
The bottom line
The authors of the study also claim that those who will benefit the most from its findings are the campaign managers with the highest budgets who have the ability to create and test many ads in real time (AB Testing), and save a lot of money on ineffective ads.
Along with this, the most important finding of the research for every campaigner and advertiser is: don't put your trust in what worked in the past, because the problems and concerns of the public change and so does their attention.
In America, the corona virus is no longer part of the election discourse as it was in 2020, so we will see less daily testimonies of citizens on Zoom explaining why they chose Trump/Biden. And in Israel in the next elections - it seems that the public will put their trust in whoever creates a discourse of unity - unlike the previous election system that focused on In the demonization of the opposite camp.
In the end, ads are designed to convince the public to interpret reality as the campaigners interpret it, and since reality is dynamic, the advertising methods must also be dynamic.
They didn't find out what works, and that's the most important discovery you'll find in this study
The web and the marketing world as a whole are flooded with "self-proclaimed experts" who promise you illogical results if you just let them manage your advertising campaign.
This research, written by real experts (and not those who "jumped" into your feed and started lecturing about their course or method), proves that there is no one magic formula that fits all.
This does not mean that there is no point in consulting a professional in everything related to marketing.
The art of marketing is indeed complex and entails a lot of strategy and sophistication, but this study proves that if someone claims that "he has all the answers" he probably doesn't have even one answer.
The author is Ofer Nidam, a serial entrepreneur, founder and CEO of Dasmit and an aerodynamics engineer
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