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The problem is they see large donors as the only path to victory as campaigns are expensive
The problem is that they see donations as the end goal and no longer give a shit if they lose.
They don't have to be. Present the people with policies that they want and the public will do all the work themselves.
The problem is getting the word out is expensive. Advertisement buys aren’t cheap.
A motivated voter seriously engaging with their social network is worth a lot more than an ad buy. The whole ad world is trying to smuggle their advertising as the genuine thoughts of a real person and politics is acting like it's still the age of Must See TV.
True but is there any indication of that currently working on the same level in terms of the return on the ad buy that a TV ad can produce? Ads are passive and they work.
Do they? We've outspent Trump in three elections now and still lost two of them. Is there any actual measure of the value of an ad for political purposes? It's not like business where you could note an increase in sales after you run an ad campaign, there's one single opportunity to "buy" and it's a secret. Anything you learn in that one campaign you just have to hope still applies years later in a different environment with a different candidate.
I'm sure they have some benefit, but the only time I've ever seen someone talk about political advertising was either when they were sick of seeing them or when an ad was going viral because regular people were using their social networks to share it.
Yes, they do work. Anyone who thinks marketing and advertising are ineffective on them ate just ignorant of how ads work on them.
If you study advertising or marketing you'll inevitable learn about Charmin toilet paper in the USA. They ran a campaign that was irritating regarding people squeezing toilet paper rolls because they were so soft. "Don't squeeze the Charmin" was their slogan. People hated the ad. They complained about the ad to stations but Charmin also sold a shitload of toilet paper based on this ad campaign so even irritating ads can work.
Things change over time. What works on one generation may not work on the next whose minds were conditioned differently in their formative years.
I think propaganda still works as a concept, but Democrats are trying to brainwash people like it's the 1960s and Republicans are on the cutting edge of lying.
I'd compare it to, say, the Lutheran Church vs a modern megachurch. Same core absurd claim about heaven and whatnot, but the megachurch knows how to package it for the modem gull.
The nature of a specific campaign might change over time but no one is immune to marketing and advertisements. Thinking it does not apply to you or others around you is always an odd take.
You seem to have read the first sentence and decided you'd gotten all you need for a reply.
No I read your whole post. The whole bit about Charmin advertising was responding to your bit about how you only heard people complaining about ads. The fact that they complained doesn’t mean it wasn’t working.
There is no reason to believe advertising is less effective now than it has been. We haven’t suddenly become smarter, more informed, or better skilled at critical thinking on the whole.
The whole point wasn't that advertising itself is a failure, it was that political advertising doesn't operate in the same system and doesn't have good measures of success. If you hear a stupid jingle every fucking day (in a time people when people watched broadcast TV reliably), when you go to buy toilet paper, something you have to do, you might subconsciously choose the one that feels well established. The advertisers can test their campaign in different markets and validate the results.
But voting isn't a purchase and isn't something you have to do but don't really think about because the options are mostly interchangeable. If an ad annoys you, you can just not vote. You also can't just test a series of campaigns to see what works because it's not an ongoing choice. You're not going to find easily comparable races and if you do you're not going to abandon one to test a null case, and even if you could the sentiments and candidates are going to change by the time you can implement your findings.
Saying "advertising sells stuff, so it must be good at getting votes" doesn't make sense. It's not the same thing.
And Im not claiming they are the same thing. I am claiming they are equally effective in increasing brand/name awareness. That is what advertising is for.
Again we haven’t become smarter. There’s no reason to believe that advertising stopped working.
They do get the word out. The problem is that we don't believe them.
And guess what the innovation in advertising this last cycle was? Cheap, to voters, text messages asking for funding. Sounds like a great time to dump the dead-weight corpos and win some elections
And what was the turnover on those buys? The fact that texts aren’t expensive doesn’t mean that is effective.