Online Political Advertising in the United States

Abstract

Digital political advertising comes inmany forms, appears in amyriad of places, and can be targeted in many more ways than traditional television advertising. At its most basic, digital political advertising is interactive content placed for a fee. It includes display advertising (images, audio, or video) and search advertising (based on keyword search behavior); the goal may be to build supporter distribution lists, to fundraise for a candidate, party, or specific political cause, to persuade, or to increase name recognition and distribute information. Paid political ads can appear as banners (across the top of the page), as page takeovers, on the side of a webpage or news feed, in mobile apps, or in social media feeds where viewers can interact, like, or share them, further disseminating paid content organically. Some online ads feature call-to-action buttons and some auto-play as pre-roll advertising, appearing before consumers can continue their online activity. Some can be skipped and others will not allow further action until the ad finishes playing. According to Borrell Associates, digital advertising made up a small fraction (less than 1 percent, $71million) of political ad spending in the United States in 2014 but was projected to comprise a fifth of spending (20.1 percent, $1.8 billion) in 2018 (Borrell Associates 2018). Although digital advertising in campaigns has been around for a while and has been a growth market for several cycles now, it has long been overlooked by scholars, especially in comparison to traditional television advertising, for which there is a long and robust literature (see Fowler, Franz, and Ridout 2016), and even organic social media content, for which there is burgeoning research (Borah 2016; Bode et al. 2016). The lack of research on paid online advertising stems, in large part, from the difficulty in tracking the placement of and spending on online ads on websites, in apps, and on social media. Unlike television, where commercial tracking data has been available for two decades, systematic commercial tracking of digital advertising is very new, and until the aftermath of the 2016