{"title":"No Better Than Soup? Comparing Null Experimental Effects of Political Facebook Ads Across Persuasive and Instrumental Measures of Effectiveness","authors":"Bridget Barrett, Shannon C. McGregor","doi":"10.1177/20563051251316117","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Studies on digital advertising effects claim that the primary purposes of online ads are persuasive: They seek to change vote choice or voters’ attitudes toward candidates. But recent scholarship has noted that social media’s unique affordances encourage electoral campaigns to use them in specific ways, such as using Facebook’s ads for email list-building. We conceptualize such strategic campaign goals as instrumental purposes of advertisements. We develop novel measures to test these instrumental effects. In an online survey experiment using Facebook ads from the 2020 Biden and Trump campaigns, we test our theory with list-building, fundraising, and persuasion ads. In a factor analysis, we find that instrumental and persuasive effects are related, but distinct, aspects of candidate support. We also test the effects of these ads on persuasive and instrumental outcomes. Our control treatment was an ad for a can of Progresso soup. We found no main persuasive or instrumental effects of any advertisement type. These ads performed no better than soup.","PeriodicalId":47920,"journal":{"name":"Social Media + Society","volume":"63 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":5.5000,"publicationDate":"2025-02-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Social Media + Society","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051251316117","RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"COMMUNICATION","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Studies on digital advertising effects claim that the primary purposes of online ads are persuasive: They seek to change vote choice or voters’ attitudes toward candidates. But recent scholarship has noted that social media’s unique affordances encourage electoral campaigns to use them in specific ways, such as using Facebook’s ads for email list-building. We conceptualize such strategic campaign goals as instrumental purposes of advertisements. We develop novel measures to test these instrumental effects. In an online survey experiment using Facebook ads from the 2020 Biden and Trump campaigns, we test our theory with list-building, fundraising, and persuasion ads. In a factor analysis, we find that instrumental and persuasive effects are related, but distinct, aspects of candidate support. We also test the effects of these ads on persuasive and instrumental outcomes. Our control treatment was an ad for a can of Progresso soup. We found no main persuasive or instrumental effects of any advertisement type. These ads performed no better than soup.
期刊介绍：
Social Media + Society is an open access, peer-reviewed scholarly journal that focuses on the socio-cultural, political, psychological, historical, economic, legal and policy dimensions of social media in societies past, contemporary and future. We publish interdisciplinary work that draws from the social sciences, humanities and computational social sciences, reaches out to the arts and natural sciences, and we endorse mixed methods and methodologies. The journal is open to a diversity of theoretic paradigms and methodologies. The editorial vision of Social Media + Society draws inspiration from research on social media to outline a field of study poised to reflexively grow as social technologies evolve. We foster the open access of sharing of research on the social properties of media, as they manifest themselves through the uses people make of networked platforms past and present, digital and non. The journal presents a collaborative, open, and shared space, dedicated exclusively to the study of social media and their implications for societies. It facilitates state-of-the-art research on cutting-edge trends and allows scholars to focus and track trends specific to this field of study.
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