Automated collection and coding of online campaign advertising.

Iowa State University, Ames IA

Investigators

Abstract

General Abstract Election campaigns serve an extremely important role in our democracy. The messages sent to voters help to define what elections will be about and how voters will ultimately choose. Two new advertising technologies -- the use of large amounts of data about individual voters and new online advertising platforms such as YouTube -- have the potential to revolutionize how campaigns are able to craft specific messages to appeal to individual voters. To date, however, there is no systematic evidence about the accuracy or effectiveness of targeting via online video advertising. This project will be the first to test how effectively campaigns can target voters with online advertising. The PIs will develop new computer science tools to capture and code the content of online advertising. This will allow the PIs to test a series of hypotheses about the effectiveness of targeting, the strategies used in online advertising, and the abilities of the rival campaigns to respond to one another. The interdisciplinary team will make its tools and data freely available to the research community, train students in both political science and computer science, and create mechanisms for real time tracking of advertising, which will be shared with leading media outlets. Technical Abstract In this proposal, the PIs set devise an empirical study of the effectiveness of political campaigns to micro-target online advertising to audiences. They develop two sets of computational tools to test the effectiveness of online advertising micro-targeting. The first of tools are a set of 'bots' with manipulated profile characteristics that mimic different types of voters. These bots allow the team to track the advertisements shown to "voters" and test for differences based on the bots' profile characteristics. The team will rely on YouTube as the on-line platform for the study as it is very popular, and was utilized by candidates during the recent presidential election campaigns. YouTube boasts over 1 billion users, and over 4 billion video views a day. More than a million advertisers utilize the Google ad platform that provides advertisers ability to select target users based on factors such as gender, age, marital status, and interests that coincide with Google's categories of interest. Furthermore, the platform accepts ads delivered from third-party sites. To test hypotheses about the effectiveness of targeting, the team plan to develop a second set of tools that allow them to code automatically the online ads along multiple dimensions. This will allow them to construct real-time measures of the messages sent to voters and to assess multiple theories regarding the ability of campaigns to target voters via online advertising.