Comparative Advertising: Strategy in U.S. House Elections*

Jack D. Collens University of Georgia

Department of Political Science 104 Baldwin Hall Athens, GA 30605

985.373.4325 (mobile) 706.542.4421 (fax) jcollens@uga.edu

Submitted for presentation at the Pre-Conference of the Political Communication Section of the American Political Science Association; August 31, 2011

Seattle, WA

* The data were obtained from a project of the University of Wisconsin Advertising Project and includes media tracking data from TNSMI/Campaign Media Analysis Group in Washington, D.C. The University of Wisconsin Advertising Project was sponsored by a grant from The Pew Charitable Trusts. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the University of Wisconsin Advertising Project or the Pew Charitable Trusts.

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ABSTRACT:

Political scientists have long recognized the increasing role of marketing professionals in

political campaigns, but have yet to examine many of the implications of this development. One

area particularly ripe for such examination is political advertising. Marketing professionals

know the research on product advertising and seem likely to include corporate advertising

knowledge into campaign strategies. One topic which has received much attention in marketing

research is comparative advertisements, which contrast two brands. Findings indicate that the

effects of such ads are distinct from the effects of purely negative advertisements. Political

scientists have not yet distinguished ads contrasting two candidates from negative ads, despite

the importance of marketing professionals and the research on corporate advertising. This study

serves as a preliminary examination of the role of marketing professionals in political campaigns,

through their effects on advertising strategy. In it, I examine the prevalence of comparative

advertisements in an overall advertising strategy for candidates to the U.S. House of

Representatives in 2002, 2004, and 2008. Consistent with the marketing literature, I find that

incumbents are less likely to use comparative ads than are challengers. This indicates that

marketing professionals may play a significant role in developing campaign strategies,

suggesting a fruitful research agenda.†

† I would like to thank Gary Jacobson for sharing his spending, incumbency, and candidate quality data. I would also like to thank the members of the panel at the annual meeting of the Southern Political Science Association for their many helpful comments. Finally, I would like to thank Jamie Carson for his guidance and comments throughout this project.

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On November 1, 2010, a press release from the Wesleyan Media Project proclaimed the

2010 midterm election cycle to be the “most negative in recent history” (Wesleyan Media Project

2010). “‘More than half of all ads are pure attack ads, and if we include contrast spots, roughly 2

out of every 3 ads on the air were negative,’” the release read. Given the evident importance of

negative campaigning, it is not surprising that political scientists have focused increasingly on

the motivations behind, influence of, and attention to negative advertisements. The number of

articles devoted to this very topic is far too high to give attention to each study in this treatment.

However, one thing that is evident is that, thus far, political scientists have overwhelmingly

focused on negative advertisements and their effects, as distinct from purely positive

advertisements. In contrast, there have been virtually no studies of comparative ads, as distinct

from negative or positive spots.1 Such ads – called “contrast” ads in the above quotation – are

fairly common and can comprise as much as one quarter of all advertisements in an election

cycle (Wesleyan Media Project 2010). Political scientists have largely treated these ads as lesser

degrees of negativity, operationalizing negativity using either the percentage of statements that

are negative or some other scale (e.g., Geer 2006, Ansolabehere and Iyengar 1995, Kahn and

Kenney 1999). However, this precludes an important potential distinction between the

motivations behind and causes of comparative ads on the one hand and one-sided ads (purely

positive or purely negative) on the other hand. One of the goals of the current study is to

1 For exceptions, see Pinkleton (1997 & 1998).

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demonstrate that such distinctions are warranted.

Particularly perplexing is political scientists’ failure to recognize comparative ads as

distinct from one-sided spots even after the discipline has largely recognized the role of

marketing consultants in political campaigns. Numerous researchers (e.g., Newman 1994,

Lathrop 2003, Dulio 2004, Lakoff 2004, Panagopoulos 2006, Cosgrove 2007) have recently

emphasized the importance of marketing professionals in the modern campaign. These

marketing professionals – who are undoubtedly tasked, at least in part, with producing campaign

ads – are likely to know the marketing research on corporate advertising. Examples of such

research are myriad and have demonstrated the differences between comparative and one-sided

ads (see, for example, Prasad 1976; Gorn and Weinberg 1984; Pechman and Stewart 1990;

Pechman and Ratneshwar 1991; Gotlieb and Sarel 1991; Putrevu and Lord 1994; and Grewal, et

al. 1997, to name a few). The question, then, is why have political scientists largely ignored

comparative advertisements, even as marketing consultants (whose field has a large and well-

established literature on comparative corporate advertisements) play an increasing role in

political campaign strategy?

There are two notable exceptions to the lack of study of comparative advertising.

Pinkleton (1997 and 1998) examines comparative political advertising’s effects on voters via

experimental research designs and finds that such ads lower the participants’ perceptions of the

targeted candidates without simultaneously lowering participants’ perceptions of the ads’

sponsors. To date, these fairly obscure and extremely preliminary studies are the only known

examples of political science research on comparative advertising. Furthermore, while these

studies focus on the individual-level effects of comparative advertising, there has been no

research on advertising strategy and the strategic use of comparative advertisements.

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With this study, I shall begin to explore the differences between comparative and one-

sided advertisements. Of course, such a subject can certainly consume an entire research agenda,

including countless articles and books. As such, this study seeks to examine only one question

regarding the differences between comparative and one-sided ads. Specifically, the study seeks

to answer the following question: What causes a candidate for the U.S. House of

Representatives to employ comparative advertisements as a major part of his her or her campaign

strategy? To be sure, most candidates utilize comparative ads at some point throughout the

campaign, assuming they sponsor more than a couple of advertisements. However, some

candidates may choose to employ comparative spots more frequently than do others.

The plan of the paper proceeds as follows. First, I examine the extant literature on

negative advertising and discuss how negativity is measured so as to miss the differences

between comparative and one-sided ads. Next, I review literature featuring corporate

comparative advertising from market researchers. From there, I discuss advertising strategy and

how candidates may be strategic in their choices to employ comparative ads as a major part of

their campaign, from which I derive my hypotheses. I then present data and methods I use to test

these hypotheses. I conclude with a discussion of how comparative advertising provides a

potential avenue for future political science researchers and the increasing importance of

understanding the role of such advertisements.

How Previous Studies Misrepresent (or Fail to Represent) Comparative Ads

Political science researchers have for years found inconsistent effects of negative

advertising. While some find that negative advertising demobilizes nonpartisans, thus polarizing

the electorate (e.g., Ansolabehere, et al. 1994; Ansolabehere and Iyengar 1995), others still find

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that attacks can have a largely mobilizing, positive effect (Finkel and Geer 1998; Freedman and

Goldstein 1999; Kahn and Kenney 1999). Regarding negativity’s effects on vote choice, the

literature is even less clear. Patterson and McClure (1975) find that advertising can inform

voters but not manipulate their ultimate vote choice. Brader (2005) finds that negative

advertising can facilitate persuasion, but not actually persuade; in a later study (2006) he asserts

that negativity promotes information-seeking behavior among voters. Geer (2006) notes that a

negative spot can help provide a more complete picture of the target’s positions. Interestingly,

however, Kern and Just (1995) discover that negative advertising not only harms the target’s

image, but can also harm the sponsor.

Of course, failure to find consensus is not surprising, in that the field – despite containing

a wealth of research – is still fairly young and the measurement of negativity is still questionable.

For example, Ansolabehere and Iyengar (1995) use a controlled experimental research design

and show participants either purely positive or purely negative advertisements. Other

researchers use a scale of sorts to measure negativity. Kahn and Kenney (1999) use a

trichotomous scale for the negativity of each ad, whereby an ad with no negativity is coded as

zero, an ad with minor emphasis on negativity one, and an ad with negativity as its major focus

as two. They then collapse the ads into races to measure a proportion of negativity in each race.

Geer (2006) employs a similar approach, coding each appeal as negative or positive and then

determining the percentage negative of all appeals.

None of these measures, however, can adequately address the question of how

comparative advertising differs from purely negative or purely positive advertising, either in

effects or in motivation. While the scale approach employed by Geer (2006) and Kahn and

Kenney (1999) – among others – is well-suited to examining the effects of negativity, this

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approach does not allow for differentiation between comparative ads and negative ones; by such

measures, comparative ads are merely less negative than purely negative ads. Thus, these

measures may misrepresent the true nature of the ads.

Perhaps one of the reasons researchers have received mixed results on negativity is that

their measures preclude examination of differential effects of comparative and one-sided

advertisements. The blunter measure of negativity employed by Ansolabehere and Iyengar

(1995), for example, finds drastic demobilizing effects of negative advertisements; the more

continuous measures employed by Geer (2006) and Kahn and Kenney (1999) yielded different

effects entirely. It may well be that these comparative ads are having certain effects – distinct

from those of negative ads – and that the more continuous measures are picking up not only the

effects of negative ads, but also the effects of comparative ads, which likely comprise a

nontrivial proportion of all ads.

Thus, it is clear that previous researchers were not avoiding the question of comparative

ads entirely. Rather, they were understandably seen as variations of negative spots. The

increased attention to negative advertising by the media and the more attractive, normative

questions related to the effects of negativity led researchers to focus solely on negative

advertising, developing measures which, as discussed above, potentially misrepresent (or fail to

recognize entirely) the nature and importance of comparative advertisements.

The Nature and Importance of Marketing Research on Comparative Ads

Comparative ads, despite receiving little attention from political scientists, have been the

focus of a great amount of literature in marketing. In fact, it seems that a preliminary glance at

any major marketing journal from the 1990s would yield at least one article related to

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comparative corporate advertising. That comparative advertising should have received so much

attention from marketing scholars should come as no surprise – television ads for everything

from toothbrushes to laundry detergent feature comparisons to similar brands. The prevalence of

such ads certainly warranted attention, similar to how the rise of negative political ads warranted

substantial scholarly attention from political scientists. Thus the prevalence of research on

comparative corporate advertising was simply a reaction to the reality of the world marketing

scholars studied.

This field of research has provided very little consensus, again much like the lack of

consensus regarding negative political advertising. Most scholars seem to agree, however, that

comparative corporate advertising can raise evaluations of the sponsoring brand, especially if

that brand is particular new to the market (see, for example, Gorn and Weinberg 1984; Pechman

and Stewart 1990; Pechman and Ratneshwar 1991; Putrevu and Lord 1994). In fact, one study

even found that “new brands comparing themselves to established brands benefit the most from

comparative advertising” (Grewal, et al. 1997, 1). Some scholars also found that while the effect

of the ad is to raise evaluations of the sponsor, the ads can also lower evaluations of the targeted

brand (Pechman and Ratneshwar 1991). The research, then, seems to indicate that comparative

corporate advertising simultaneously raises evaluations of an ad’s sponsors while also lowering

evaluations of the targeted brand.

Marketing scholars do seem to disagree, however, on how credible these comparisons are

in the minds of the audiences. According to one group of researchers, negative claims in the ads

about the targeted brand often lack credibility and thus may not have the desired effect of

lowering evaluations of the targeted brand (see, for example, Prasad 1976 and Grewal, et al.

1997). Another study found that the effects of comparative ads are conditional on the ads’

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perceived credibility, suggesting that the ads’ sponsors should seek to maximize credibility in

order to maximize effectiveness (Gotlieb and Sarel 1991).

Particularly important for the current study is the finding that comparative ads increase

awareness of the targeted brand (Pechman and Stewart 1990). Thus an established brand may

have very little to gain by using comparative ads to highlight differences with its lesser-known

competitors. However, competitive or upstart brands have the most to gain from such

advertisements (Grewal, et al. 1997). As a brief anecdotal aside, Coke would never compare

itself to Pepsi in a current advertisement, but over the years Pepsi has often aired ads featuring

blind taste tests to compare the two brands. Coke dominates the competition in American sales,

representing 41 percent of all soft drink sales in the United States in 2009 to Pepsi’s 29 percent.

While Pepsi is undoubtedly established, it still must compare itself to Coca-Cola to attempt to

gain ground. Similarly, an unestablished brand name would seek to compare itself to a more

established brand, drawing appropriate contrasts to highlight the value of the sponsoring brand

over the targeted brand. Thus, a less established brand can raise its own image and

simultaneously attack the image of the more established brand.

Clearly, marketing scholars and professionals recognize the importance of comparative

advertisements. Every day new ads air about how this brand of paper towel soaks up more liquid

than the leading competitor or how this disinfectant kills more bacteria than the better-known

disinfectant. Brands may hire marketing professionals to create an advertising strategy that will

keep a leading brand dominant and established by targeting an upstart challenger brand; or they

will try to bring the lesser-known brand to the public’s attention by challenging the more

established brand. Such professionals employ the research in their field to develop a strategy

that will allow their brand to increase its market share.

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Thus it comes as no surprise that such professionals are increasingly present as campaign

consultants in the political world. Political scientists have noted this fact (see, for example,

Newman 1994, Cosgrove 2007, Dulio 2004, Lakoff 2004, Lathrop 2003, and Panagopoulos

2006, to name a few). In fact, Newman (1994, 17) even notes that the primary reason for the

increase in marketing consultants as campaign professionals is likely the increase in television

and advertising. These professionals come from a field that recognizes the importance of

comparative advertisements and have employed such ads to help candidates win office. That

political scientists have recognized the role of marketing consultants in campaigns yet have

failed to incorporate much marketing research into our understanding of campaigns remains a

paradox. It seems evident that marketing research is playing an increasingly important role in

campaign politics; political scientists would thus be wise to incorporate this literature into

existing theories.

Extending the Research to Political Science

Pinkleton extended this literature to finding the effects of comparative political ads on

television (1997) and in print (1998). In both studies, he found that such ads did, in fact, lower

the evaluations of the targeted candidate while largely avoiding much of the voter “backlash”

against the sponsoring candidate for airing attacks. However, he also finds that voters can

punish the sponsor if the attacks seem less than credible or are personal in nature – this leads

Pinkleton to conclude that the most effective comparative political ads focus on “such key

characteristics as issue positions, voting records, and past experiences” (1997, 27). While these

studies are indeed preliminary (both studies use experiments and have yet to be applied to real-

world, large-N situations), they provide the only explicit look at comparative political

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advertisements.

The extant literature on comparative corporate ads and comparative political ads raises

several important questions for political scientists. One of the most obvious questions stems

from the marketing literature, which finds that comparative advertisements can raise the

awareness of the targeted brand (Pechman and Stewart 1990) and that competitive or upstart

brands benefit the most from this type of advertising (Grewal, et al. 1997). The extension to

political science seems fairly simple. If comparative ads increase awareness of the target, then

incumbents should be unlikely to employ comparative ads against a non-quality challenger. Any

ad targeting a weak opponent – whether negative or comparative – would raise the name

recognition and voter awareness of that weaker candidate. Thus incumbents facing such

challengers would have little to gain from this strategy. Furthermore, challengers to established

incumbents (the established “brand” of candidate) should seek to use comparative ads

specifically because it can lead to what marketing scholars have called brand association –

comparative ads can raise a non-established sponsoring brand’s image to be on par with the

targeted brand (Pechman and Ratneshwar 1991; Grewal, et al. 1997). In addition to mere brand

association, Pechman and Ratneshwar (1991) find that comparative ads can also lead to brand

differentiation, whereby the ads decrease evaluations of the targeted brand. Thus challengers

employing comparative ads may enjoy two major benefits – while their ads will decrease

evaluations of the established incumbent, they will also increase awareness of the sponsoring

candidate by associating him or her with the incumbent.

Thus it would appear that incumbents facing low-quality, weak challengers should be

unlikely to use comparative ads as a major part of their campaign strategy, as such ads will

increase awareness of the opponent. This leads directly to one hypothesis regarding candidates’

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advertising strategy:

Hypothesis I: Incumbents will be less likely than challengers to include comparative ads as a major part of their campaign, ceteris paribus.

Not all challengers are created alike, however. While an incumbent facing a weak

challenger actually has disincentives to use comparative advertising, such disincentives do not

exist when the challenger is already fairly well-known. A challenger who has previously held an

elected office, for instance, is already known by at least some voters, so the incumbent would not

need to worry about raising awareness of that challenger. Thus the incumbent’s disincentives to

use a comparative ad disappear when a challenger has previously held an elected office. In fact,

if an incumbent feels threatened by a quality challenger, he or she may choose to employ

comparative advertisements to decrease positive perceptions of the challenger and increase the

positive perceptions of the incumbent.2 This implies that incumbents facing quality challengers

may differ from incumbents facing weaker challengers, yielding a second hypothesis:

Hypothesis II: Incumbents facing a quality challenger will be more likely to include comparative ads as a major part of their campaign than will incumbents facing weaker opponents, ceteris paribus.

This does not address, however, how candidates for an open seat would use comparative

ads. The previous argument can be extended here. A quality candidate facing a non-quality

opponent would likely see little benefit in using comparative ads, but – in races for an open seat

– would be more likely to use such ads when facing another quality candidate. The same holds

2 For the remainder of the paper, I shall use the word “quality” to refer to a challenger or candidate for an open seat who has previously held an elected office. For a discussion of why this measure is preferable to other, more nuanced measures, see Carson, Engstrom, and Roberts (2007).

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for those non-quality candidates facing quality candidates. This suggests that a quality

advantage may be a driving force behind whether candidates for open seats use comparative ads

and leads to a third hypothesis:

Hypothesis III: Open-seat candidates with a quality advantage over their opponents should be less likely than those without such an advantage to use comparative advertisements, ceteris paribus.

Of course, measures of candidate quality may simply be capturing the competitiveness of

the race. In competitive races, whether or not one’s opponent has previously held elective office

may not matter as much. As such, I shall include in the models other measures of

competitiveness, discussed below in the data and methods section of the paper.

Data and Methods

To test my hypotheses, I shall examine the advertising strategies of all major-party

candidates who aired ads in the 100 days leading up to the 2002, 2004, and 2008 elections.3 I

examine only general election advertisements, as data on primary candidates are often

unobtainable or unreliable. Data on advertisements are drawn from Goldstein and Rivlin (2005,

2007, & 2011), who use satellite tracking data to measure each time a specific ad airs in one of

the top 100 media markets. Ads are then coded for several key variables, including what the

purpose of the ad is – to promote a candidate, to contrast two candidates, or to attack a candidate.

For the purposes of this design, I collapsed this purpose measure and coded all contrast ads as

3 Of course, this method only allows me to draw inferences about candidates who did air ads. Candidates not airing ads are excluded, which may bias the results in that candidates who do not air ads are less likely to have held previous elective office or are sure losers. While this clearly presents some problems for drawing inferences about candidates generally, the design still allows for inferences about those candidates who are able to air ads and thus remains substantively of interest.

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one and all others as zero. Finally, I collapsed the measure into candidates, so that each

candidate represented one observation. The dependent variable then becomes the percentage of

all ads aired by that candidate that are intended to compare or contrast two candidates

(Comparative Pct). I have also included a similar measure for other models (results included in

the appendix), in which I code the percentage of distinct ads aired (excluding duplicates of the

same ads) which are comparative in nature, yielding a variable I have labeled Distinct

Comparative Pct.

Because of the potential differences between open-seat and incumbent-defended races

and to avoid any confusing interactions, I shall run two models – one for open-seat races and one

for incumbent-defended races. The dependent variable being a proportion, I use ordinary least

squares (OLS) regression analysis.4

In the first model, I include a dummy variable indicating whether or not the candidate is

the incumbent (Incumbent). This allows me to test the first hypothesis. I also include a district-

level measure of challenger quality (Challenger Quality), which takes on a value of one if the

challenger in the race has held previous elective office, following Jacobson (2009). I posit that,

in races with quality challengers, both candidates would be more likely to run comparative ads.

To test the second hypothesis, I include an interaction term between Incumbent and Challenger

Quality (Incumbent*QualityChallenger). The resulting coefficient is interpretable for

incumbents who are facing a quality challenger, while the Incumbent variable is interpreted for

incumbents facing non-quality challengers and the Quality Challenger variable is interpretable

4 Long (1997) indicates that this technique could work for a proportional variable whose values do not cluster at either end of the measure. If the data appear to cluster in such a way, Long suggests using the two-limit tobit maximum likelihood estimator, given the censored nature of proportional data. While there do appear to be many candidates who used no comparative ads, the rest of the data are well-distributed. For parsimony’s sake, I employ OLS.

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for the quality challenger. I expect the value of the coefficient on the interaction term to be

positive, implying that incumbents facing a quality challenger will include comparative ads as a

greater part of their advertising strategy than will incumbents facing a non-quality challenger.

To test for quality effects in open seat races in the second model, I develop a

trichotomous measure, which takes a value of 1 when that candidate has held elective office but

his or her opponent has not, 0 when neither or both candidates have held elective office, and -1

when that candidate has not held elective office but his or her opponent has (Quality Advantage).

This will allow for a test of Hypothesis III, in that candidates with the quality advantage were

presumed to be less likely than those without it to use comparative ads as a major part of their

campaign strategy.

Both models will include a measure of party, to be coded as 0 when the candidate is a

Republican and 1 when he or she is a Democrat (Democrat). Both models will also include a

baseline total number of ads aired by that candidate (# Ads), to test whether an inflated

proportion is just an artifact of too few ads. In addition, both models will include the logged

difference in spending by each candidate (ln(Spending Diff)). This measure should capture race

competitiveness which, as stated above, may play a role in determining how the quality variable

fits into the theory. Finally, both models include fixed-effects variables for the year of the

election, omitting 2002 as the baseline (2004 & 2008). While this will not necessarily allow for

generalizations about differences between midterm and presidential election years, it is an

important variable to include nonetheless, so as to differentiate between these two elections.

Stated formally, the models take the following form:

y =! +"1x1 +"2x2 +"3x3 +"4x4 +#1 x3x4( )+!5x5 +!6x6 +!7x7 +" (1) y =! +"1x1 +"2x2 +"3x3 +"4x4 +"5x5 +"6x6 +# (2)

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Equation (1) represents Model A, for incumbent-defended seats, and includes the following

independent variables: # Ads, Democrat, Incumbent, Quality Challenger, Incumbent*Quality

Challenger, ln(Spending Diff), 2004 and 2008. Equation (2) represents Model B, for open seats,

and includes the following independent variables: # Ads, Democrat, Quality Advantage,

ln(Spending Diff), 2004 and 2008. Both models shall be estimated using OLS, with Comparative

Pct as the dependent variable.

Results and Discussion

Table 1 reports results from the both models, with Model 1 representing incumbent-

defended races and Model 2 representing open seat races. Looking at Model 1, there were 589

candidates for incumbent-defended races who aired ads in the 2002, 2004, and 2008 general

election. As can be seen, Incumbent, the Incumbent*Quality Challenger interaction term, the

logged spending gap, and 2008 are statistically significant. Incumbents facing non-quality

challengers’ comparative percentages were 30.7% less than that of challengers, consistent with

Hypothesis I. The interpretation of the interaction term’s coefficient is somewhat trickier.

Incumbents facing quality challengers’ comparative ads proportions were (0.085-0.307)*100 – or

22.2% – less than that of challengers. This is consistent with Hypothesis II, in that the effect of

incumbency is less for those incumbents facing quality challengers than for those facing weaker

challengers. Also, 2008 campaigns’ comparative percentage was 12% higher than that of

elections in 2002. This may be due to the presence of a major political figure at the top of the

ticket, but it may also be that comparative ads were more common in more recent elections.

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Table 1: OLS Regression Results, Models 1 & 2

Variable Model 1 Model 2

Constant 0.538* (0.12)

0.720* (0.30)

# Ads 0.000 (0.00)

0.000 (0.00)

Democrat -0.004 (0.02)

0.038 (0.05)

Incumbent -0.307* (0.03) ---

Quality Challenger 0.010 (0.04) ---

Incumbent*Quality Challenger 0.085† (0.05) ---

Quality Advantage --- -0.040 (0.04)

ln(Spending Diff) -0.016† (0.01)

-0.037 (0.02)

2004 0.049 (0.03)

0.037 (0.06)

2008 0.120* (0.03)

0.009 (0.06)

N 589 163 R2 0.2433 0.0345

Note: Results are OLS coefficients, with standard errors in parentheses. †: Significant at the p≤0.10 level

*: Significant at the p≤0.05 level

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Table 1 also reports the results from Model 2, which contained only open-seat races. A

total of 163 candidates aired ads in the 2002, 2004, and 2008 general elections. The only

significant variable in this model is the constant. The quality advantage variable is insignificant.

Its insignificance may be due to any number of factors. It may be that the quality of candidates

does not matter in open seat races or that many non-incumbents lack the necessary resources to

hire marketing professionals who may employ comparative advertisements strategically.

Whatever the cause, the data do not support Hypothesis III.

While we cannot reject the null hypothesis that candidate quality does not matter in

campaign strategies in open races, these results are preliminary. It should be noted that these

results encompass only three recent election years and 163 candidates. These limitations are the

direct result of data availability. The Wisconsin Advertising Project (now the Wesleyan Media

Project) data are only available and reliable for the years included, with 2006 being unavailable.

Importantly, the results provide preliminary support for Hypotheses I and II. Incumbents

do appear to be significantly less likely than challengers to use comparative advertising as a

major part of their broader advertising strategy, with incumbents facing weak challengers having

an even smaller proportion of comparative advertisements than incumbents facing quality

challengers. It seems plausible that this is a direct result of the presence of marketing

professionals on campaign staffs, who recognize the applicability of marketing research in a

political setting. The incumbent “brand” does not benefit from comparisons to non-established

candidates or “brands,” unless the other candidate is already well-known and the incumbent is

seeking to expand his or her “market share” (or share of the two-party vote). These results are in

line with the marketing research and suggest the importance of that research in political

campaigns.

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Conclusion

Negative advertising has received much attention from political science researchers for

obvious reasons. People will always question the normative implications of such ads, which

begs for increased scrutiny of negativity. Political scientists have largely attempted to address

these normative concerns, with mixed results. Similarly, marketing researchers have studied

comparative corporate advertising in order to determine the effectiveness of such ads under

varying circumstances. However, political scientists have yet to examine the role comparative

political ads play in election campaigns, despite the growing presence of marketing consultants

on political campaign teams.

The current study attempts to incorporate marketing research into political scientists’

understanding of campaigns in one important way – advertising strategy. While advertising

strategy is undoubtedly the result of numerous campaign factors, scholars have yet to examine

what leads some candidates to use comparative advertising as a major tactic of their strategies

while others prefer to use a more one-sided message. Here, I argue that such a decision is based

at least in part on candidate quality and incumbency status.

There are numerous limitations to the current study. First, there are only three election

years. It may be important to track the influence of incumbency and candidate quality over time,

to see how they have affected the usage of comparative advertisements. Second, the data for

2002 and 2004 do not include every media market. Third, campaign strategies may change

throughout a campaign, in that a candidate who increases his or her standing in the polls leading

up to election day may adopt a different strategy. Despite these limitations, there are strong

results indicating that incumbents employ fewer comparative ads than do challengers, and that

this effect is conditional on the quality of the challenger. This suggests that marketing

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professionals may play a role in congressional campaigns.

This study represents only part of what could become a fruitful avenue for future

scholarly research. Comparative advertisements comprise a nontrivial amount of ads in any

given election cycle in recent years, yet scholars have largely ignored them or misrepresented

them as a different kind of negative ad. Marketing research, however, has indicated that

comparative ads may have unique benefits for the ads’ sponsors. Such benefits seem applicable

to political campaigns. As such, scholars would do well to acknowledge these ads and attempt to

distinguish them from their purely positive and purely negative counterparts. Furthermore,

scholars should continue to address the presence of marketing professionals in campaigns by

including marketing research in developing theories of campaign strategies. To ignore such

research is to turn a blind eye to the reality of marketing’s influence on politics, something we as

political scientists should be loathe to do.

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APPENDIX Table 1A: Regression results for Models 1A & 2A, using Distinct Comparative Pct

Variable Model 1A Model 2A

Constant 0.504* (0.12)

0.727* (0.28)

# Distinct Ads 0.003 (0.00)

-0.006 (0.01)

Democrat 0.002 (0.02)

0.024 (0.05)

Incumbent -0.306* (0.03) ---

Quality Challenger 0.002 (0.04) ---

Incumbent*Quality Challenger 0.076 (0.05) ---

Quality Advantage --- -0.034 (0.03)

ln(Spending Diff) -0.015† (0.01)

-0.036† (0.02)

2004 0.039 (0.03)

0.061 (0.06)

2008 0.124* (0.03)

0.041 (0.06)

N 589 163 R2 0.2703 0.0370

Note: Results are OLS coefficients, with standard errors in parentheses. †: Significant at the p≤0.10 level

*: Significant at the p≤0.05 level

[22]

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