more digital consulting firms. there s still a belief that ads work but as television habits shift, the question is how do you get ads online. we re seeing the emergence of persuasion advertising online in the circle. before it was just getting people into the funnel to become field organizers or donors. this sort of transitions us to this kind of what the next frontier is. the thing about broadcast ads in general is it s essentially a 1960s technology, which doesn t mean you shouldn t do it, hi, advertisers, keep doing your thing, but that there are other more specific ways to yeah. the possible of targeting particularly online right now is really incredible. not only to get potential supporters so that they become more excited and potentially become donors but to actually find those people who the campaigns know need to be persuaded in a swing state while they re watching a youtube video and converting them at that
campaign he said you guys tell us where to run the ad it s a ads. i m skeptical that the things i m spending money on are doing anything. for three weeks they randomized his ads. what they found was ads have been impact but it s small and it decays pretty quickly. so you can move some numbers, you can move his positive number in that case, you can move his number in the horse race, but after a few days it goes away and after a couple weeks any influence is gone entirely. one of the other things that we ve seen, and there s a new paper i was reading last night by a political scientist, co-authored by a political scientist named mike jones that i know and he looked at congressional races. basically what happens is the ads tend to cancel each other out. the thing that makes an ad effective is a lot more ad bys than your opponent. it s hard to have a lot more ad buys because competitive races
by definition are ones where people are running roughly the same amount of ads and buying the same amount. it seems to me there s an interesting deeper cultural tension here between a cons consultant class that has been navigating by gut and instinct and this kind of emerging empirical analysis. bob, i want to get your thoughts on this. you go in, what are you basing your decisions on here or have been over the last, you know, several decades you have been doing this work when you tell someone that we should be putting money in running ads and this ad is going to work? well, first of all, i m retired so i guess i could just join here in the beating up because i don t have any self-interest in this. secondly, even the piece of evidence you cited that the ads cancel each other out in congressional races, that means no one s side is ever going to unilaterally disarm. third, that study focused on congressional races where there is a lot of gerrymandering so most races are decided in
campaign is set up is that in addition to the salaries listed in the filing to the federal election commission, the admakers and the ad team take a certain percentage of the ad buy which is just lumped together in the fec reports with the actual tv costs. explain what that means. well, bob shrum can probably do numbers better than i can, but basically it s a leftover from the early days of commercial television advertising, and as much as 15% of the ad buys, mostly negotiated down from that, can be called can basically go to the ad team as a fee. right. so people who are listening to, the incentive structure is such that you re the person who oversooes what kind of ads to run and how much money to put on ads, and your compensation is such that the more money you put into ads, the more money you get paid. what s really unique though about this sickle is we re seeing the emergence of a lot
would do is hire a consultant and they would tell you to do basically two things, raise money and run ads. now that the conventions are over, the campaigns are shifting fully into the second phase, the ad phase. the campaign and media narrative will be dictated in large part about what those ads say. new research into what motivates people to vote and what doesn t has the potential to revolutionize campaigns. if the people who run the campaigns realize it in time, it could shape the outcome of the election. join us are sasha issenberg. he has a much awaited new book that comes out tuesday. chris hughes, co-founder of facebook and publisher and editor in chief of the new republic. and walter shapiro, a former white house speechwriter for president jimmy carter. great to have you all here. we also have bob sha rurump whos