Advertising
How Campaigns Waste Money on Connected TV — and How to Stop
Campaign Trend
“One example: a mid-cycle experiment with Google showed that frequency mattered more than platform or device. Fourteen YouTube impressions moved numbers like broadcast television, forcing his team to rebuild its entire media plan. The takeaway wasn’t that YouTube replaces TV, but that campaigns must constantly test, learn, and adapt—even in the middle of a cycle.”
Spam and Scams Proliferate in Facebook’s Political Ads
New York Times
“In a report released on Wednesday, the project identified 63 advertisers that have by several measures employed deceptive or fraudulent practices. They amount to roughly one in five of the platform’s top 300 spenders in the category of political or social advertising.
“Collectively they bought nearly 150,000 ads, spending almost $49 million over the past seven years, according to data in Facebook’s ad library.”
Advocacy
Real Stories Win: Lessons from a Persuasion Experiment
MRSS
“What we found is that this approach — real people, real stories, real language — handily outperformed traditional political creative, especially with the voters we need to reach the most.”
Campaigns
Zohran Mamdani's sticker contest is the perfect kind of political engagement bait
Fast Company
“On September 25, Mamdani’s campaign announced through an Instagram video that it would be hosting a sticker design contest to get New Yorkers registered to vote before the October 25 deadline. The competition gave followers just 36 hours to submit their designs, during which hundreds of pieces of art flooded the campaigns’ submission portal. Now that a winner has been selected, anyone who is registered can submit a form on Mamdani’s website and pick up the sticker at one of Mamdani’s canvases or volunteer events.”
'They Want Stability': Political Pros Face Pay, Career Pressures
Campaigns and Elections
“Nearly two-thirds of respondents — 61 percent — reported having four or more years of paid political and public affairs experience. But even with that experience, some haven’t yet cleared $60,000 a year, the report found.”
Content
What the shutdown meme war says about both parties
Semafor
“No joke gets funnier through explanation, but this one seemed to get funnier to Republicans the more seriously that Democrats took it. Which might explain why Jeffries quickly pivoted to meme-ing Vance right back with a Garbage Pail Kids-coded version of his face.”
Social Media
Political Content Engagement Model: A large-scale analysis of TikTok political video content features and audience engagement
Science Direct
“Our results show that political videos featuring out-party criticism and emotionally charged content, especially those with uncivil language, generate high levels of engagement.”
How TikTok keeps its users scrolling for hours a day
Washington Post
“According to TikTok’s internal documents, revealed as part of a multistate lawsuit against the company, it takes just 260 videos, which could be as quick as 35 minutes, to form a habit on the app.”
Technology
“Name that Nancy” – An AI Case Study
FP1
“Our creative team priced out a shoot to execute the concept. One problem: the price tag exceeded $100K to build a game show set, hire several actors and do the spot the right way.”