In the last few days we’ve seen a barrage of TV ads from almost every candidate and it’s only going to get worse as we approach May 20th.
Therefore, we thought it would be interesting to ask you, our readers, whether you’ve personally ever found campaign ads effective. To test this, we asked if ads have ever changed your opinion about a candidate.
For the second straight week we had a close result, ultimately a 53%-47% split, yet more people said that ads have not affected their beliefs about candidates.
216 readers expressed this opinion while 190 people asserted that ads had changed their views about a candidate. Still, don’t expect TV ads to go away anytime soon.
The full results are included below:
Have campaign ads ever changed your own views about a candidate?
- No (53%)
- Yes (47%)
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6 Responses
Really? Then explain Tom Wolf.
Actually, I love this site, but I hate these questions. They are silly exercises in vanity. We all want to think our opinions matter (why else would we post under comments? ;o) ) so we take the polls, but anyone who knows polling knows these are all irrelevant polls. Politics PA: please stay away from this silliness and do what you do best: inform us on what is going on with campaigns statewide and regionally. You are great at that.
Thomas & PA News…
I have to defend PoliticsPA a bit here, because they do some really good pieces also – however, on this particular article, yes it’s about as bad as online ‘journalism’ gets.
Jackb – there are several problems with this article and the survey behind it.
1. The headline is that readers say that Ads don’t work, but that wasn’t the question, the question was asking people whether they personally had been swayed by an ad.
2. Even if the headline and the question matched up, the question is meaningless because
a) anyone who said ‘No’ is lying
b) the nature of advertising, political or otherwise, has impacts on all of us every day which we aren’t typically aware of – so nobody taking this survey is in the position to answer the question meaningfully via self-reflection
This isn’t one of those questions where opinion matters and certainly not a question where non-expert opinion matters. People are spending billions of dollars per year doing research into what sorts of marketing and ads work and what don’t… if any candidate looks at a poll and says they’ll skip ads because people say they don’t work, then they shouldn’t be running for office.
I would like to ask both of you what is stupid about this question. I’m not trying to push buttons, just want to know what your opinions are.
totally agree, politicsPA is going down the tubes. site staff really not capable of quality journalism.
Seriously, another nail in the coffin of the reputation of this site. Such a stupid question. Do we think that the readership of PoliticsPA have any of the same characteristics as the target audience for political campaign ads? Embarrassing.