A firm that tracks the content of political ads has some interesting data to report regarding the content of the creative airing in battleground states across the country. Despite early vote windows being already open — or soon to be — both parties remain in a persuasion mode when it comes to their TV spots.
To wit, Democratic campaigns and groups remain focused on women’s rights while the GOP remains focused on immigration — at least when it comes to linear TV.
“I will say one thing that’s been strange, an awful lot of the ads even at this stage have all been about persuasion,” Kevin O’Reilly, chief data officer at XR Extreme Reach, told C&E this week. “[We] still haven’t seen an awful lot coming out about get out the vote.”
XR Extreme Reach typically analyzes brands’ commercials using proprietary video detection and transcription tools for things like ‘is the brand logo being added enough times?’, ‘is it being positioned in a really strong call to action?’ But they’ve been analyzing political ads as well. To date, their tool has recorded less than 1 percent of ads that have a GOTV intention, which is less than a 1000 across over 500,000 airing across all campaigns.
O’Reilly explained: “We can look and see what the candidates are talking about. What is the subject matter that they’re each focusing on in this local market? What is the sentiment like in these ads? How many of these are attack ads, and over what type of subject?”
On the latter subject, he notes, contrast ads remain the most popular at the moment. By XR Extreme Reach’s count, 50 percent of Democratic local linear ads have been attack ads and 72 percent of Republican ads.
