There’s a lot of discussion about the impact of cell phone usage on polling, but what about the impact of another new technology, the digital video recorder (DVR) on the reach of political advertising? As of this Spring, 34% of US Households have a DVR. Media watchers see a correlation between the number of people watching a show on DVR and the median age of the viewer — DVR users tend to be younger.
Since voters tend to be older, perhaps TV ads are still a decent investment this cycle. But, as DVR adoption continues, I wonder if politicians will stop spending money on TV ads. In addition to reaching a smaller percentage of the population, TV ads are so expensive that most campaigns can’t do a lot of advertising until right before the election, so their effectiveness is even more questionable in early voting states.
TV ads are the stupidest of all political advertising, so I certainly wouldn’t mourn their demise. I just can’t think of another advertising vehicle that can replace them.
JPL
I use an antenna and don’t own a dvr so yes I’m flooded with political ads. Since I’m in my early sixties, I have learned to tune them out. When my sons are visiting, they can’t.
WereBear
I knows I’m nutty, but what about everybody gets a website, and ads are illegal?
You may say I’m a dreamer…
WyldPirate
@WereBear:
If only that were so, werebear, if only…
zmulls
I’d contribute for a TV ad for the “The Rent is Too Damn High” guy.
Cause…..cause the rent IS too damn high.
WereBear
But of course it’s not just ads; it’s the swarm of trolls, too.
Juicebaggers, ho!
Is America ready to give up its addction to commercialism?
I’d bet not.
Comrade Javamanphil
Hard to skim the ads watching the morning news while eating breakfast. As such, I now know that some black guy and crazy faced Grandmom named Nancy are imposing sharia law on America by bankrupting the nation and we should be very, very afraid. Or something. (I’ve also learned that every Republican candidate has no idea how national economies work. Going to be a fun 2 years!)
Face
Republican-to-Dem ad ratios are running, by rough estimate, about 5:1 where I live.
Citizens United strikes again.
Aris
Seriously, if political ads could be banned from TV, the political landscape would change considerably. Why not?
TV ads fro tobacco and hard liquor are banned and it’s not considered a violation of the First Amendment. Why not political ads that are bad for you and useless as information?
Political ads on TV are banned in most western democracies. Why not here?
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cleek
@Aris:
liquor is permitted, now.
Guster
I’m getting a shitload of online ads from Eliot Cutler, who’s running for governor in Maine on the platform that he’s a pro-moderation moderate. Every time I play a YouTube, he’s there.
NonyNony
@Aris:
Whenever you come up with a question like that, it’s usually because our concept of “Free Speech” is much, much different than that of other western democracies. That’s the case here – in the US banning TV ads would be considered a huge encroachment of the government into political speech, which is protected by the First Amendment. Other nations don’t have that kind of protection, for better or for worse.
But then in the US we’ve got the toxic rulings that corporations are people and that money is speech. Those things all brew together in a way that make political TV advertising far, far worse than it needs to be.
4tehlulz
While homes may filter them out, public places like bars, restaurants, and doctor’s offices don’t, so there is still a big benefit to TV ads.
Joey Maloney
Txt spam? If you think tv ads are the stupidest political ads possible, just wait until the candidate’s marketroids boil the message down to 140 chars. Lso, 2.
Rosalita
and how will tv stations find a way to jam those ads (to keep their revenue) down our throats anyway? I wonder…
Agoraphobic Kleptomaniac
What is this DVR you speak of? Is it like a Torrent or Amazon on Demand or iTunes?
If Sharron Angle wants to pay my bill to watch Treme, i’ll listen to her kooky commercials.
Scuffletuffle
Tunch’s backside when he roams the neighborhood?
Rosalita
@Aris:
cha-ching!
West of the Cascades
Once the GOP gets back into power, the brain implants downloading Chamber of Commerce propaganda 24/7 …
Ash Can
@Joey Maloney: Those would be so much easier to ignore, though. No inane jabbering noise, and I could just hit “delete.”
arguingwithsignposts
Well, the Republicans already have FOX “News” channel. Why don’t we just give the Dems one?
ETA: 100 percent of my household doesn’t own a TV, so I only see ads that I want to click “play” on. Works for me.
Aris
@NonyNony:
True… but the First Amendment protects all speech, not just political speech, and tobacco ads are still banned from TV and there hasn’t been a challenge as far as I know. It seems that commercial speech can be curtailed. Are political TV ads that much different? Are they really political speech?
I much prefer our more expansive concept of freedom of speech, but I can also see that political ads on TV are a big problem since they appeal to the basest of emotions and do nothing to enlighten. I don’t know how they could be banned, but many of them do not seem to me to be much different than yelling “fire” in a crowded building when there isn’t a fire.
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Zifnab
Perhaps politicians could do more debates, interviews, and public appearances.
Oh, no. Wait. That would imply they’d have to face voters and wouldn’t be 100% in control of the narrative. Maybe email spam, then.
Moses2317
Well, if we are going to overcome the flood of secretive corporate cash funding the Republicans, we will have to keep using social media and direct voter contact to replace TV ads.
Winning Progressive
jwb
I don’t watch TV, except occasional sports broadcasts (which have been eerily devoid of political ads), so I haven’t seen many political TV ads this year. Websites, on the other hand, have been crammed with targeted political ads.
I was polled on my cell phone the other day. I realized half way through that I’d made a mistake and should have stated my age as 25 so my one data point could be extrapolated into the voice of the generation. (If you ever look at the crosstabs from the polls you’ll see that the numbers of under 30s that they reach are tiny, so as the pollsters work their formulas the few respondents they do have from the category get magnified.)
Voted today (which was amazingly cathartic) and going to the OfA call bank tonight.
Violet
@Agoraphobic Kleptomaniac:
Exactly. While DVR users may skew younger, real youngs mostly watch TV on their laptops and don’t use a DVR. That’s the factor that is going to make election TV ads useless, or at least have to change a lot, in upcoming years.
Dennis SGMM
Other than the occasional old movie in TCM, I don’t watch TV. I have heard a plethora of Whitman ads on the FM radio in the car though. I imagine that there’s saturation bombing on the broadcast channels.
Suffern ACE
Whatever, something needs to be done to stem the flow of money for these darn ads. Sucks to be at the confluence of three states. I really don’t have any connection to these candidates at all. I can’t even vote for them.
Since I don’t have TiVo, I’m watching Sesame Street this morning just so that I can be free from the non-stop “we fight for the middle class” “my opponent lied 20 years ago once” ads.
El Cid
Speaking of advertising and campaign $$$, Greenwald follows up on idiot Bobo Brooks’ column on how these stupendously large campaign funding and ad spending by big business interests don’t matter much, since I’m usually not able to interest myself in reading his crap in its entirety.
Mr. Comfortable Rationalist Brooks is one of those so free of partisan bickering that math is merely a thing to ignore.
Real bipartisan moderates who aren’t waging class war know that 10+% is trivial.
It’s pretty unfair to mathematically relate $140 million to $1.4 billion, just like it is totally unfair and partisan to speak about some $140 billion expenditure in military contracting when someone is shrieking about a $1.4 trillion deficit.
BattleCobra90000
The central assumption of your post is that ads are less effective on people with DVR’s — it turns out this is false.
Dennis SGMM
@El Cid:
It’s a simple matter of right and wrong: it’s right to blow $140 million researching the possibility of a Quran-o-tropic missile system, it’s wrong to spend the same amount on a few miles of light rail. Just as it’s right for Californians to vote in a Three-Strikes law but, it’s wrong to raise taxes to pay for lifetime incarceration and medical care for those who are sentenced.
Joseph Nobles
If I have already seen a commercial, skipping past it later on the DVR is just as effective a reinforcement as watching the whole thing. And I brake for movie trailers if I haven’t seen the trailer. I probably get more impressions skipping the ads than letting them run while I go grab a drink or operate the washer and dryer.
artem1s
they won’t need ads soon. political races are pretty much a game of ‘survivor’ now. pretty soon we’ll just dump them all on a deserted island and watch them rip each others throats out, jump through made up competition mazes and vote them off via Twitter.
the worlds biggest loser gets to be Prez for 4 years.
I’m voting for anyone who has the nerve to have an extra head and arm surgically attached to their bodies.
The Republic of Stupidity
I haven’t owned a (working) teevee machine in 5 or 6 years, so blissfully I’ve managed to avoid this onslaught of political advertising of which ya’ll speak…
Just an observation… I no longer listen to advertising of any sort, if I can manage to do so… if I have the radio on, I turn the ads down. Yes, it is annoying, but if you leave the sound up, you CANNOT keep the voice out of your head.
You CAN choose to skip over a print ad and not take it in, but you CANNOT keep sound out of your head, even if you think you’re ignoring it.
Try it… you’ll be surprised at the beneficial effect (not listening to ads…) it has…
mistermix
@BattleCobra90000: Interesting link. He may be right that people are still watching ads, but consider this:
If you’re judging shopping patterns as the basis for whether commercials are being ignored, there’s a question of whether you’re just seeing long-ingrained behavior rather than the result of people watching ads on their TiVo.
Here’s my experience, and my family’s: We’ve been using a DVR for years and I don’t watch any ads. Maybe that’s not the norm, or maybe as DVR users become used to time-shifting more programming, they stop watching ads.
RSR
You know what’s even worse to me than the political ads during campaign season? finding old campaign ads from prior races–say a Chris Christie ad–months or even years later on your DVR.
(I’m a DVR geek and literally have seasons of shows that have gone into syndication that I haven’t watched. We recently came across old Chris Christie ads while catching up on My Name Is Earl. Currently we’re archiving How I Met Your Mother and The New Adventures of Old Christine, so we have this campaign season’s ads to look forward to next spring and summer. Yea.)
john b
it just seems like web video ads will take their place. and you can’t fast forward through those (yet). and advertisers can get much more info about who is watching the ad that way as well.
Nied
I’ll just leave this right here.
gigaom.com/2008/10/13/confirmed-obama-is-campaigning-on-xbox-360/
drkrick
But political speech is more protected (I guess the technical way to put it is that restrictions on political speech are subject to a higher level of scrutiny). So a ban on political ads would be evaluated differently that a ban on cigarette ads.
As annoying as the ads are, the real reason they’ve subverted our democracy is the fact their cost drives a lot of the money race. A huge percentage of the billions that are spent in an election cycle now goes directly into the pockets of broadcasters, and other sellers of advertising, with a 10-15% commission going into the pockets of the political consultants who place the ads.
Unfortunately, that sets up a set of incentives that are going to be tough to fight – the broadcasters will fight any restrictions the same way any business fights a threat to the bottom line. The consultants, who have the ear of the politicians more than anyone else, will protect the status quo for the same reasons. And the moneyed classes that know this system helps them keep things under control will fight to preserve it as well.
Franklin said we had a republic if we could keep it. He would probably have been pleased to learn it lasted as long as 200-odd years. Sucks to be around when the clock ran out, though.
Roger Moore
@Joey Maloney:
I don’t know. There’s plenty of fun, pithy stuff they manage to fit on bumper stickers, which are typically even shorter than a text message. And think about all those classic political slogans from yesteryear. You could fit “I like Ike”, “54/40 or Fight”, and “Tippacanoe and Tyler Too” into a single text message with plenty of room to spare.
I think the main problem with SMS and tweets is that people want to fire them off quickly, so they say the first thing that pops into their heads. If they spent time actually composing them as though they mattered- as is typically done for ads- they’d be a lot more coherent.
Chris G.
I imagine one way to deal with DVR usage is to use ads with visuals that are such that they get the message across even to someone fast-forwarding through them. That and pay more to have the first or last ad in an ad slot, which people tend to see more of even when they’re trying to skip through the ads.
Martin
The bigger problem is that young people aren’t buying cable. A LOT of them just Hulu + NetFlix + BitTorrent their TV.
Same formula of ‘If you fuckers won’t give it to me in a format I want, I’m going to take matters into my own hands’ that has been applied to, well, every other thing the shortsighted fuckers do.
My contempt for business leaders is not waning. They’re virtually all fucking idiots.
RSR
I haven’t tried it yet, but some PC-based DVRs (and one of the later generations of ReplayTV) can strip most advertising out of your recordings. It’s a neat feature, but the studios pretty much blackballed ReplayTV for implementing it. And most people aren’t such DVR geeks like me that they roll their own.
PS. SageTV works really well and has a great extender. It’s worth considering if your in that market.
Brachiator
@mistermix:
No. TV ads reach older voters, and this year older voters are more energized and mobilized. Also, radio ad buys continue to rise even in the age of the InterTubes, since morning and afternoon drive time in major cities still beats out alternative media sources. Political strategists will realize that it is worthwhile, and probably cost effective, to buy ad time on Internet streams, especially for national elections.
Fox News, of course, is one big ad, so getting political hacks onto the air permanently as correspondents, pundits and commentators is little more than one big media buy, with First Amendment backing.
Political ads will get more frenzied and more attack based to get maximum attention and to give their targets less time to respond. Although I hope he loses, the “Agua Buddha” spots that are being used against Rand Paul are stupid and meaningless.
And political strategists will tell you that they deliberately run negative ads and are happy when voters get disgusted and stay home, particularly when races are tight. They will try to peel off some voters and hope that they can still win in the margins.
No one would spend a dime on TV advertising if they didn’t think it was effective.
Deb T
Don’t have a DVR but I do have a mute button.
Luthe
Ads in the sidebars of blogs. ::grumbles about the SarahPAC ads she is getting::
robert green
as someone who directly benefits from this shift from TV advertising to something else, i have an answer to that question: targeted online advertising. the spend right now is about 90/10 to TV, but that can’t last. people use dvrs more and more, and the tv ad is barely targeted. an online ad can target at a level that is pretty insanely granular.
i did one for emily’s list this cycle (mama grizzlies) that was tremendously successful in large part because we knew EXACTLY to whom we were speaking, and what it was that interested that target group. you just can’t do that in TV.
at the moment, there’s a lot of fear from the campaigns and there’s a huge motivation to do TV buys (because the mark penns of the world make money from a percentage of the ad buy–shitty motivation or what?), but that too will change.
Bass
@mistermix:
That’s certainly possible, although they likely controlled for products shown on ads in that period.
A lot of it, as the study pointed out, comes down to time-shifting. If they’re watching TV live most of the time, they’re getting exposed to ads (even if they’re just skipping through them when they come up). If they’re recording stuff, then watching it later, not so much.
@Martin:
That’s part of it (I’m a young person, and much of my TV consumption comes from Hulu). Of course, they have creative ways of making you watch advertisements (i.e., not letting you skip them). I wonder if you could do something like that for television.
This is going to sound weird, but what if the cable networks made all their programs “on demand” in a certain time slot? In other words, during, say, 6-6:30 PM, you could start watching the Simpsons episode from start to finish, even if you ended up watching it past 6:30 PM (where it ends normally, in my time zone). Interspersed with that would be Hulu-style “forced watching” ads that you can’t skip past, although you’d be given a choice of either watching a longer section of ads, or interspersed smaller ones.
BattleCobra90000
@mistermix:
You raise a valid point, but if I understand it, it would hold only if ads had no effect — which is empirically not the case (in both prior studies and in this study).
As to your point about getting used to time-shifting, they see this in the data — it takes about six months for the treatment group to use their TiVo’s like ordinary TiVo users. However, their results are robust whether they use the first 12 or second 12 months after TiVo analysis (i.e., after the users learn how to time-shift and fast-forward).
And finally:
Actual commercial skip rates are about 7% compared to the 47% rate self-reported by viewers. So my question is, how do I know you’re not lying? :)
WaterGirl
@mistermix: I only watch TV shows recorded on Tivo, and even at 2x and 3x fast forward (no sound) I can see that they make each candidate appear to be a liar and a cheat.
If I watched the ads, I wouldn’t know what to believe, and I would simply retreat to where I started from and vote party, not candidate, or do the research on the web. Either way, there is no effective influence from the ad.
I, too, wonder if political ads on TV make a difference anymore. It seems a colossal waste of money, but maybe it helps the economy.
WaterGirl
@Chris G.: They already use visuals in the political ads I see while fast forwarding at 2x and 3x without sound on my Tivo, and they always tell me the other guys is terrible, and a liar, too.
I miss Obama’s political advertisements from when he was running in Illinois. There would be a rolling list of his accomplishments on screen, such as passing HBxxxx for recording police interrogations, etc. Those ads actually contributed to the viewer’s knowledge of the candidate.
Martin
@Bass:
I’m almost positive Apple is going to introduce precisely this sometime in the next 6 months. They even have a patent on exactly what you just described including the ability to insert user-targeted ads as robert green described. But it would be fully on-demand, more like Hulu.
Bill Murray
I watch a lot of TV and don’t have a DVR, but have hardly watched a political ad in 30 years because of my ability to change the channel
monkeyboy
While 34% of households own a DVR, I doubt many of them are “smart” TV viewers who only watch things that have been recorded.
In many households the TV is on all the time as background noise or in case anything interesting comes on.
TV political adds will die at the same time that normal TV adds do which will probably be never. The only thing that will change is the demographics.
WaterGirl
@Martin: I love Apple, but I would never purchase or use a product that did that.
BillR
I line in NYS-the majority of Political ads here never seem to give the Canidate’s Political Party affiliation-anyone else noticing this??
Arclite
A lot of people eschew broadcast & cable TV altogether. I only watch DVDs and BRDs. I have no feed at all. Anything I want to watch I stream on Netflix or Hulu or Comedy Central or whatever.
The only political ads I see are on BJ, actually. Some are web ads, and others are ones posted by the FPers.
Martin
@WaterGirl: How is it different from a TV pre-TiVo?