Ahead of the impending US election, political ad spend is proliferating in swing states.
To sway as many moderate or undecided voters as possible, many campaigns emphasize the socioeconomic issues they believe swing-state voters actually care about (rather than just dinging their opponents).
And how, exactly, do campaigns know what issues to focus on? Companies like contextual ad platform GumGum are trying to help political buyers answer that question. Last week, GumGum released a study detailing which of the three key issues – the economy, immigration and reproductive rights – most concern voters in the six hotly contested swing states: Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada and Wisconsin.
What’s especially notable is the differences in the issues voters prioritize in different states, says Hailey Denenberg, GumGum’s VP of strategic initiatives and data. Political content in Michigan mentions economic issues much more frequently than content in any other swing state, for example, while Arizona is rife with political ads that are about reproductive rights, according to the report.
GumGum’s clients include political ad buyers, Denenberg tells me, and those buyers have been asking the company for more details about trends in voter perceptions this year.
The results of the report, she adds, may help guide some of the decisions political ad buyers are making in the final home stretch ahead of the election.
State of the ballet vote
To compile its research, GumGum analyzed at least 500,000 individual pieces of digital content, from news sites and editorial blogs to online video clips and connected TV. (This study did not include linear TV.)
Specifically, GumGum analyzed content that was consumed over the course of a week – August 22 to August 28 – for any mentions of the three political controversies voters are thinking about most (the economy, immigration and reproductive rights). Then, GumGum mapped out how many of these mentions occurred in each of the six swing states.
During this time, political content in all six swing states mentioned the economy more than immigration or abortion. But the emphasis on the economy differs by state.
Michigan accounted for roughly 26% of the mentions of economic issues in political content across all six swing states, while Pennsylvania accounted for about 22%. Content consumed in these two states most frequently mentioned issues related to economic uncertainty and inflation in particular, based on the report.
While those results aren’t necessarily a surprise, Denenberg says, it was notable how many more mentions of the economy GumGum found in these two states compared to Arizona and Georgia, at 14% and 15% respectively.
Voters in other states seem more focused on issues related to reproductive rights. Abortion is a leading subject for content consumed in Arizona, where abortion-related issues are mentioned more frequently than in any other state. Arizona accounted for 25% of mentions of abortion in a political context, while Georgia and Michigan each accounted for about 18%.
As a border state, immigration is also a critical issue in Arizona, which had 1.7 times more mentions of immigration than the average across all six swing states. Pennsylvania was the battleground state with the second-highest number of mentions of immigration, accounting for 18% of all mentions (compared to 30% for Arizona).
Political buyers take aim
So what do these numbers mean for political advertisers?
The majority of political ad budgets are spent in the last handful of weeks ahead of the election – meaning the competition for voter attention is about to get a lot hotter. In those last few weeks, candidates will “really want to focus [their] time, messaging and ad spend on the issues that Americans care about most,” Denenberg says, especially in swing states, where there are many more impressionable voters.
And there’s still time for buyers to adjust campaigns accordingly in the final few weeks before Election Day, Denenberg says.
Candidates for federal office might choose to focus more of their messaging on the economy, for example, because it’s the most frequently mentioned political issue across all six swing states. Those candidates may also center their state-level campaigns on specific issues, such as, say, serving ads that touch on reproductive rights in Arizona while focusing on inflation in Michigan.
But state-level candidates might choose to home in on whichever social issue seems most important in that particular state.
Still, Denenberg says, there’s no way to predict exactly how political ad buyers might reorient their spend between today and November 5.
But for these buyers, she says, their goal is clear: attempt to sway as many swing voters as humanly possible … and then hope for the best.
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