Lab 031: Persuadables

The other day, I was on Pinterest and it linked me to a latch hook rug. I was trying to make a.

Rug from yarn scraps. Why do you have yarn scraps?

I don't have them yet, Okay, I was gonna get them. I want to make something.

Oh my god, where are you gonna? Who do do people purchase yarn scraps?

No, but that's the problem.

So you gotta knit or something and then have leftover yarn and then you can make the rug.

I don't listen. I saw it on Pinterest. It was a latchuk rug or it was a punch needle. I was really liking all of those fiber arts, and I said, oh, I'm gonna watch your tutorial on YouTube. And when I got to YouTube, it was all presidential election twenty twenty. YouTube looked defer Rent. Okay.

Same. Every time I get on Twitter, I can't even scroll like one thumb up without somebody tweeting about the election. And I'm like, I just want to see tweets about versus. I just want to see tweets about, you know, Lovecraft country. I need a break from all of that. I'm TT and I'm Zachiah and from Spotify. This is dope Labs.

I'm getting a lot of information about the election, and it's just everywhere. I'm having an election burnout.

Right, It's haunting my dreams two more months ago. It feels like an eternity away, Like twenty twenty is the longest year of all time. I feel like two months into election, I mean, how old am I going to be in two months?

Forty seven?

Definitely at least forty seven.

And the ads are not stopping on these different platforms. It's not stopping at YouTube, it's not stopping with people tweeting stuff. I'm also getting text messages. First of all, my name is not William, but the messages are saying, like them cities are burning, what are you going to do? And I'm like, what is happening? Is this about what's happening in California? I don't think so, right, what's going on?

I'm getting text messages from all over They're like the Great State of North Carolina. I'm like, I don't live in North Carolina.

Somebody has got something mixed up along the way.

There's something mixed up, and so I'll respond, I'm like, I don't live in North Carolina. They're like, okay, I'll remove you from our list. Then the next day I get three more text messages about North Carolina where the polls are in North Carolina. Doesn't help me.

Man, When you just said okay, I'll remove you from our list, I felt so optimistic. I picked up my phone. I was ready to reply to every spam message I received.

No, they don't remove you. They just keep going. They just keep going. Today's lab is all about political ads.

Specifically how political ads play a role in our greater political behavior, and the strategies that are used to make political ads. Let's get into the recitation.

So what do we know?

We know political advertising has been around since American government has been around.

Basically, Yes, I saw Hamilton and they were definitely using political ads.

But things have changed a little bit.

Yeah, Because I mean when you think back to when we were young, you would see, you know, political ads on television, you would hear them on the radio. But now with Facebook and YouTube and Instagram and all these things like that, they've got a lot of different ways to hit us with the political ads.

And even though it feels like the election season is longer than it used to be, for some reason. I don't know if it's because we were all at home, but I feel like it's been politics NonStop and it may feel like it couldn't be possible, but it seems like the ads are ramping up the closer and closer we get to the election.

Absolutely, I'm getting to messages literally every day.

Well what do we want to know?

Well, I want to know the history of political ads and how they've changed over time.

And I'm interested in the different objectives like what do you think this text message is going to do?

And I think another important thing to figure out is what actually gets people to act? So after they see an ad in whatever form, what is it about the ad that gets them to do something about what they just saw? And what assumptions are there about how people will act?

And then just thinking about once you know what gets people to act, how are you leveraging technology? So has social media given these campaigns an advantage? Right?

It?

Is there something about social media that's better than more traditional forms of ads. I imagine it's more responsive than a billboard.

But how that's a really good question, like and do they work? Do political ads work? Are they changing folks' minds?

I'll say, when I see too me the ads, I'm turned off. So is there a risk?

Is there a limit? Like, yeah, do people get tired of seeing the same ad over and over again? I think that's true for some people, But I guess we got to find out. Let's jump into the dissection.

So we're switching things up today and we're bringing in not just one, but two guest experts to talk to us through the complexity and nuance of political advertising.

Our first guest is doctor Cheryl Laird.

My name is Cheryl Laird. I am a professor of Government and Legal Studies at Voden College.

Doctor Laired's research is based on political behavior, specifically black political behavior and how that relates to public opinion. So she's really focused on the consumer side of political ads. How do ads affect a person's behavior.

Our second guest is Jenna Golden. Hi.

My name is Jenna Golden, and I work with companies and organizations that are looking to better understand how to tap into the advertising ecosystem in Washington, DC. Prior to this, I ran the political and advocacy sales team at Twitter.

So while doctor Laird focuses on the receiving end and the effect of political ads. Jenna Golden focuses more on the advertiser side, working on things like strategy, and.

We're going to talk about those strategies and their effect a little bit later in the show.

But first let's walk through the history of political ads. Political ads have always been around, it's just been in different forms. So before the invention of the printing press, it was all in person, so they would get up on stage and say why you should be voting for them. Post the printing press, you could put up a flyer that says, hey, vote for me.

And then when radio came along, it changed the game. You could get on the radio say hey, I support Canada, X, Y and Z, give all the drama, all the emotion, and you would just broadcast over the waves. Everyone was tuning in.

Here's doctor Laird.

So I mean the advent of various technological advancements. So as we've moved and progressed on our technology, political advertising has been able to shift in a number of ways.

But this was especially true with the boom of television in the nineteen fifties.

But really, I think the biggest step towards advertising that I think we still see today, right is the visual, the pairing of the visual and the audio.

In nineteen fifty two, with television hitting the scene, Dwight D. Eisenhower, who wasn't president at the time but would become our president, later created a campaign of forty twenty second commercials called Eisenhower Answers America, where he answered questions posed by Americans about very specific issues.

Since then, political TV ads have become the dominant form of campaign advertising, eclipsing even social media. Here's Jenna.

If you look at the budgets of political advertising, you will still see that the vast majority of budget is spent on television ads. So it is still TV that is king when it comes to the dollars. TV is not measurable the way that digital is measurable.

That's right. Social media has now opened the floodgates for a whole new form of political advertising. Unlike television, social media advertising is targetable and measurable. So even if you want to reach a very specific group of people, like within a zip code or a certain age group or a certain racial demographic, you can do that with micro targeting.

You know, the micro targeting that is available on digital is you know, ten times deeper than what you get elsewhere.

So this means each ad that is seen or an ad impression theoretically has more impact because you're reaching the exact group of people that you want to Doctor later agrees that social media ads are a game changer, and for a multitude of reasons.

Social media is like broken the whole like space on this now, right, like with Twitter and Facebook and all these different in YouTube and you know, just clicking on the websites, I mean, like anything now you are just seeing advertising.

And that repeat exposure, so like across all of those platforms is another thing that sets social media advertises apart from its predecessors. Every click of the mouse or tap on your screen is a new opportunity for a fresh ad to be thrown in your face.

And so from a campaigner's perspective, the more you click, the more I understand about you as a user of the Internet. This helps the campaign get down to the exact target population they want to reach. And sometimes a type of ad they send you depends on what stage the campaign is in. Here's doctor Laird, So.

It depends for instance, on the target of the ad, right, like what are you trying to do with your ad? And so people have hired firms, people hire consultants, people get focus groups together. I mean like there's a lot of money invested into how do you advertise to people and what are you appealing to?

Jena breaks down the objectives of campaign advertise into four different stages, awareness, acquisition, persuasion, and mobilization.

In a lot of cases, especially if it's a newer candidate that people are not familiar with, it starts with what we call awareness, and really the goal here is let's just get out this name and this information to as many people as possible that potentially are within our sort of space or geography, so that we get the awareness that we need for the candidate.

Right. So, when you think back to any type of primary elections, and it always during the primaries, you see a bunch of new names. So when a new candidate comes out and it's primary season and not a lot of people know that person, the aim of that campaign team is to get that person's name out so that more folks know who they are and they recognize the name when they see it.

But then the campaign, especially from an advertising standpoint, moves to the acquisition stage. And what I mean by acquisition is there are really two pieces of data that every political campaign wants. One is your email address. Piece two in the acquisition stage that they're working really hard at is acquiring money, so it's fundraising.

So boom. If I know you know who my candidate is, I want to know who you are. So I want to build a huge listser of people who know my candidate, like my candidate, and are willing to support my candidate with a couple of coins.

Yeah. So if I see the name Zakiah Wattley and I'm like, okay, let me go research her website. So I go to her website and I find out more about her. I'm like, okay, that's cool. And then they say put your email here to sign up for this list serve so that or to find out any updates on Zakia Wattley. And so I put in my email address because I want to know more. Now they have a way to target me with more of their ads.

And that's exactly what I did to become your friend.

I knew it. I was like, hmm, where have I heard this name before.

Then it moves to persuasion, and persuasion is where you really start to see the content change. This is where I'm trying to reach people to persuade them to vote for my candidate or come to my side. Oftentimes you hear in the political ad world people call their target as persuadables. So if I'm Joe Biden, what I want to do is I want to target the people in the middle that aren't sure and they have the ability to be persuaded.

So here, if you're already team Zakiyah, I don't want to talk to you anymore. Really, I'm not spending any more money on you. I'm looking for the people who are like, huh, could be Team Zakiah, could be Team TT. I want those people in the middle, and then I'm going to try to persuade them like, hey, TT's not really that nice, She's just pretending. Wait. So, one of the most effective forms of persuasion, doctor Lay says is the emotive appeal that's trying to get an emotional response.

One of the most common emotions that ads will try and in sight is fear, and one of the most notable political ads that use fear as its tactic was from nineteen sixty four, when Lyndon B. Johnson was running against Barry Goldwater.

The Daisy ad from LBJ where you have the little girl playing with the flower and then you see the large like atomic explosion go on. And this fear that's supposed to be garnered from that ad, right, like the innocence of this young woman is at stake because we are in the midst of this fear of potentially being annihilated by these weapons of mass destruction.

That is traumatizing. I can't even believe they were showing that on television.

This was also the case during the nineteen eighty eight election between Michael Ducaccus and George Bush Senior. Here there was an ad that incided fear and was also pretty problematic and harmful.

And when we say problematic, what we mean is racist.

The one where they talk about Ducacus on crime and they show the image of Willy Horton, right, and that the furlough that was granted to Willy Horton allowed him to basically go and commit another felony against a couple, right, And that that was something showing that the Caucus is soft on crime and that Bush would be a better person to put into office. But with doing that, they're

So that's a problem, right, because it's bigger than I want to win this presidential election. This is influencing people's feelings about black people. And I feel like it's negligent to put out stuff like that. You need to focus

And I think we still see traces of that to this day.

Oh my, oh gosh.

Yeah.

So beyond fear, there are some other well known methods of persuasion as well, like negative advertising or focusing on a single issue that voters care about, whether it's war, economy, or global pandemic.

We are seeing so many ads during this election cycle that touch on the pandemic. There's a lot. I mean, we've been trying to stay away from talking about the pandemic and the coronavirus, but it's so hard because it's a part of really everything that we're doing these days, and so putting it into political ads, it definitely taps into a lot of emotions that people are having.

Taking that persuasion right through the roof. So just a recap, we've gone through the first three stages of campaign advertising, awareness, acquisition, and persuasion.

And then lastly we have what we call mobilization or GOOTV, and GOOTV stands for get off the vote. So there's a big gap between people who say that they're going to vote and people who actually vote, and so the messaging happens in those last stages mobilization and get off the vote. A lot of it is here's a reminder of where your polling place is. Here's what time the polling place opens. Make sure that you're there early. Don't forget that your apps and tee ballad is coming. This

With those objectives in minds, campaigns reach out to potential voters using mailers, emails, TV ads, social media ads, phone calls, and a whole bunch of other methods.

You know, it's really one thing to say, I like this ad, I understand more about this candidate. I'm willing to share my email or donate, But I think it's very different when it comes to actual mobilization. I think sometimes it takes different motives to get you out of the door, to vote, out of the door, to attend a political rally.

Yeah, the activation energy is different for different people. So it's not just like, oh, we all are going to register and we're all going to get out to vote, like some of the things that folks need to do to be able to feel empowered to do those those things, it's a lot harder for them.

Yeah, ideally everyone would be able to just drop that ballot in the mail, done right, right. But I am ready. While I might be burned out on the ads, when it's time to vote, I am ready. Me and my little Instagram stories. How will be there to cheer you on, to say, hey, did you vote yet? Hey, this is what you can do in your state. I want to use my voice to kind of help somebody over the hurdle if it will even help them. I'm there to do it.

Right, and I think we should all be doing that. Like, if you know where your polling place is, put up the link for how you figured that out, show a step by step, do a screen recording, and post it. I actually have a friend that did that. She showed how she figured out where her polling place was and I was like, this is amazing. It makes it seem so easy, you know what I'm saying, And it should be easy because it's the American way. Voting is a part of our democratic system and we should all be

If you're not already, and look out for our Instagram, Twitter, it's gonna be on our website at Dope Labs podcast dot com. We're gonna tell you everything you need to know about registering to vote, and then when it's time to vote, what you should do then too.

We're gonna take a quick break, and when we get back, we're gonna talk more about social media, the political ad space, and how your Internet activity determines what you see.

And we're back. We're talking to two guest experts, doctor Cheryl Laird and Jenna Golden about the history, objectives, and effects of political ads.

Like we said earlier, the Internet has really changed the game within the political atmosphere with the rise of social media advertising campaigns, and even those people not directly affiliated with campaigns are able to specifically target certain voters and then give them exposure to certain ads.

So how do social media ads target people? What criteria do they use? Jenna breaks it down.

So there's sort of these two camps, and one is information that you choose to actively share, and the second is sort of informed information based on the actions and steps that you take. So you'll see both are ways that brands and organizations can ultimately target you.

I went to Zakia's website because I'm interested in possibly voting for her, and when I get there, I put in my email address, I put in my age, I put in my zip code maybe, so from there they have a lot of information about me, where I live, how old I am, so a lot about my demographic and that is me actively sharing.

But because tt has selected many Instagram ads, purchased many embroidered sweatshirts across the web, I know a little bit more about her, and so those are things that she's not actively sharing, but those are things that I'm collecting through her cookies on her website. That are describing the type of person she is on the web.

Cookies is like leaving breadcrumbs wherever you go these website you go to, you drop a few bread crumbs so they know you were there. Because I mean, your cookies are there.

There's a whole bunch of data that's being collected there your cookies, and in that data is information about your preferences, information about your gender, information about your social identities, information about your background, and now the types of ads that you can get towards you will be specific in what people think may be appealing to you, and that's like a whole new frontier.

Jenna says that it's not just your demographics and online behavior, that zip code tt is just as important.

So there's a lot of recognition of individuals and targeting individuals, but there's also a lot of care that goes towards thinking about the geographies in which those individuals are located. Because at the end of the day, you might be persuadable, but if you are a leaning Republican and you live in one of the most democratic states, it may not be worth the budget to focus there. Whereas I want to focus on what are these key swing states where I can really get the most bang for our bum.

They might spend a little money on you, but they'll spend more in places that are battlegrounds. And when we say more, we don't mean a couple hundred thousand dollars. It's estimated that seven billion dollars will be spent on advertising during this general election.

Did y'all hear that? That's billion with a beat?

And the bulk of that, like sixty to seventy percent of it will be spent in the last ten weeks leading up to the election. And that's just hard money from campaigns. There's also soft money from other groups and organizations that are campaign adjacent or want to see a certain candidate win. They're spending money too. That's so much money, But money isn't the only thing that's getting out of control. The other thing that's out of control is political misinformation.

All of the elements that we've talked about, the unlimited funding, the increased targeting technology, it all helps breed this landscape where it becomes impossible to know what's fact and what's not and what Doctor Laird says, one misinformed match can create a huge fire.

So I think that That's the thing to think about with misinformation as well, is that it's dangerous because it's collective, right, Like it is not just one individual, but it is you know, a bunch of people all kind of starting to agree and it doesn't take much to convince either.

And where that misinformation is coming from might surprise you. Jenna says that the misinformation is primarily coming from organic content, not paid advertising content. That means it's your own people, real people, creating posts that are inaccurate, sharing them, and they're spreading all around in your social network.

This reminds me of our episode protect to how we talked about how virus spreads, like how it can just hijack everything as soon as it's introduced to a new hostel. And that's exactly how the misinformation is spreading.

And when you take that information and put it in the context of these conversations about regulation of information on social media platforms. We've all seen Mark Zuckerberg on CSPAN or if you think about Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter, they're all trying to do something different. You can pull down the ads, but that doesn't change the problem.

So how are social media companies stepping up what are they doing to combat the spread of misinformation?

So now what Twitter has done over the last few months has started to essentially place labels on pieces of content that are tweeted out that could be misinformation. And why it's so notable is because we all know that while Twitter is the smallest, it has the largest megaphone, and it also has quite a power user, which is Donald trumb who is the President of the United States.

Twitter also made the decision to ban political ads all together last November.

Other social media companies like pinterest in next Door didn't allow political ads from the get go. They wanted nothing to do with it, Like they said, no political ads on this app. But for the ones that did, like Twitter, Facebook, Google, YouTube, all those they're trying to put the toothpaste back into the two.

When you think about the amount of content that is pumping through those platforms on a daily basis, there is not a way to possibly monitor all of that content, definitely not manually, and as we've seen as a lot of these companies have tried to monitor some of that content from an AI standpoint or a machine learning standpoint that often misses contacts.

Facebook has started to put some labels on things too. But do you know what I saw in response or a screenshot from a group message where people were saying, this is how you remove fact checkers from your posts, And I was like, you don't want your post to be checked for facts, y'all just want to be wrong. That made me really sad.

Yeah, people don't want the facts. They don't want them because to them, it doesn't matter what the facts are because it's not what they believe. It's not what they feel exactly. If they don't believe it, it is not a fact.

And I think that's the other part. Not only do they not want to hear the truth, I think some people are not really grasping the full magnitude of what happens when you post something that's not true. Doctor Larrt touched on this.

That is one of the things that is really troubling about the digital social media space is that most of these companies and people.

Have created it. I don't think have totally.

Processed that it can happen like that, like it can happen in the snap of a finger. You'd be stunned by what people are willing to do or are influenced by, right do.

You remember pizzagate TT.

Yes, that was in twenty sixteen during the election, and there was this conspiracy theory that said that this pizza place in DCO had a child trafficking ring running through it and that one of the candidates had something to do with it. Yes, folks that are showing up to the pizza place, like where are the kids? And they got threats in everything.

Yes, this one man drove from North Carolina to DC to that pizza shop.

That's four hours. That's four hours with a gun.

He was wrong, and once he realized that it was all made up, just misinformation on the web, he turned himself in. That's a wild ride.

Are there still people who believe in Pizzagate?

Well, Li's coming back in twenty twenty. Have you heard. No, it has a new younger audience on TikTok.

Oh No, okay, Well that's that's all you need to say, period. TikTok. Y'all got to do more research, y' y'all are not even doing the bare minimum research, y'all just sharing tiktoks.

Social media is such a big part of this. And if there's anything we want you to walk away with, we want you to know when you're being targeted. Yes, what is an ad what is just conversation? So when you're sharing things, know that you got to do your due diligence. They're looking for people just like you. They're saying, hey, do you like puppies and do you care about puppy meals? And then they're going to say this candidate has twenty

Don't fall for the okie dope.

The time lapse of how much you're engaging that, I mean, it is mentally taxing, right, and cognitively taxing, and could be leading to other kinds of outcomes that we haven't truly surmised from all of it because it is so overwhelming. How much is happening.

My model used to be zero fatigue, but now it's all the fatigue. Okay, all the fatigue, election fatigue, general fatigue, people fatigue, just all of it. We are fatigued, and I think we're basically headed to the land of burnout.

Honestly, and with that in mind, our next episode is actually going to be all about burnout. How to recognize it and how to handle it. And we are so excited to talk about it because I mean, being bombarded with all these political ads and then the pandemic and all these different things that are going on in the world. RP to Chadwick Boseman, and we're all just tired. Twenty twenty has sucked. And so this next episode on Burnout is for the people, and we're going to get through this.

A lot of people.

I mean me, it's is I I am people.

After this episode airs, I'm going to announce your run for president.

My run. I don't want to be president. I think i'd be the worst president. I'd be like everybody, just chill.

I'll go to bed. So earlier t TV comes for president.

I think for your political ad, if I am on your campaign strategy team, I'm gonna be like, Okay, I've got a lot of pictures of food that Zakia has made everybody likes to eat. I think that's something we can all bond over. And so then I'm just putting out pictures of plates that I have had a Zekias asks meing like with Zekiah.

We all eat, we all eat good. Mic drop no more hashtag struggle plate.

That's it for Lab thirty one, but we have so much more for you to dig into on our website, so head on over there, Dope Labs podcast dot com.

On our website you can find a cheat sheet for today's lab, along with a ton of other links and resources in the show notes.

And if you want to stay in the know with Dope Labs, don't forget to sign up for our newsletter on our site too.

We won't sell your email address, but we might use it for TT's campaign.

Just delete all your cookies.

Right special thanks to both our guest experts, doctor Cheryl Laird and Jenna Golden.

You can follow Jenna Golden on Twitter at ji Golden.

And you can visit doctor Cheryl Laired's website at Cheryl Lair dot com. That's c h R Y L l a I R D dot com. You can also follow her on Twitter at Cheryl Laird. You can find even more links to their work in our show notes.

You can also find us on Twitter and Instagram at Dope Labs Podcast.

TT is on Twitter at d R Underscore t s h.

O, and you can find Zakiya at z said. So are y'all registered to vote yet get started at headcount dot org slash play your part. It's quick and easy, I promise yes.

Also, we love hearing from you. What is your think about today's lab? Do you have ideas for future labs? Call us at two zero two five six seven seven zero two eight and let us know.

You can find us on Twitter and Instagram at Dope Labs. Podcast TT is on Twitter at d R Underscore t s h O, and you can find Zakiya at z said.

So follow us on Spotify or wherever else you listen to podcasts.

Dope Labs is produced by Jenny radalt Mass of Waverner Studios.

Mixing and sound design are by Hannes Brown.

Our theme music is by Taka Yasuzawa and Alex Sugiura, with additional music by Elijah Lex Harvey. Dope Labs is a production of Spotify and Mega Oh Media Group, and.

It's executive produced by us T T show Da Zakiah Wattley.

What would you put in your mem You.

Know who I really feel like is aligned with like? My brand is somewhere between Anita Baker and Meghan Thesallion. Yes, and so I really have to do some micro targeting. To get certain groups of people where I feel like Meg will be effective, but not the groups that will be turned off by that, and that are more Anita Baker and Shade. Yeah, but that's where I land. Anita the Stallion, Anita the Stallion,