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Comment by nemothekid | Hacker News Reader

>condition everyone to think that political advertising works

Political advertising _works_. Regular advertising _works_. You are not immune to propaganda.

That's a bit complicated. The most basic thing is awareness, and advertising definitely does what you'd expect there. If your problem is that nobody knows who "nemothekid" is then you're not going to get many votes, and advertising "nemothekid" helps with that.

But it gets murky pretty quickly after that, an advert which tells people "nemothekid" is a straight shooting maverick, a fresh face with plenty of experience, who is laser focused across a broad range - vote nemothekid, that's nemo-the-kid - well that might work fine even though that's self-contradictory nonsense. Because it put your name in a voters head.

After reading all that I'm pretty convinced to vote nemothekid, just from sheer repetition

Any time I hear a political ad, it makes me think of the spoof ones in Vampire Bloodlines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ovLsFhd-EM

Sure, it just depends on what your goal is and what your budget is. If you have millions of dollars and want to give a candidate a boost, you can definitely do so. Ads that feature the candidates name will increase voter familiarity, which will increase votes. Even with the new rules in place, you can probably still achieve similar ends by running 'get the vote out' ads only in areas where your candidate's likely voters live.

But this doesn't mean FB ads work for everyone. Most companies don't have millions of dollars to spend on raising awareness, because mere awareness doesn't translate into purchases in the same way it translates into votes.

Should be easy to prove that, then.

How well does political advertising work? During the 2016 presidential election campaign, Clinton spent about twice as much on advertising as Trump did. How many Electoral College votes did that change in the end? Advertising may work to an extent, and large campaigns need to do at least some, but it seems to quickly get into an area of diminishing returns.

It's not a linear function of raw ad spend dollars, as there's a huge amount of different ways you can spend an advertising dollar. Trump ran a very smart advertising playbook, because he had some serious manipulation experts on his team. Hilary ran a terrible terrible campaign strategy because she was sure, like many people, that it was in the bag, and she basically felt entitled to the position and didn't really think she had to earn it. They spent that money because that's the point of political contributions. That's why even Ted Cruise, who will probably never be voted out, still spends a majority of his time phone banking and getting campaign contributions.

The campaign contribution network is the whole point. That's where most of the lobbying comes from.

>Hilary ran a terrible terrible campaign strategy because she was sure, like many people, that it was in the bag, and she basically felt entitled to the position and didn't really think she had to earn it.

She still literally got millions more votes than Trump did, and the end result was almost a 50/50 split between them. That isn't the result of a terrible terrible campaign strategy, but bad tactics vis a vis the votes that actually mattered, and bad PR from the DNC leaks. Still hardly a slap in the face from the electorate.

Trump got most of his ads for free - news companies letting him call in and say anything unquestionned for as long as he liked

Yes, if you spend your money unwisely, you may not see results. That isn't specific to advertising. Movie studios regularly spend $200-300MM on movie budgets that go nowhere, and some that return over a billion dollars. Effectiveness isn't linear with budget.

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