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C H A P T E R F O U R Tracking the Volume and Content of Political Advertising S INCE 2000, THE WISCONSIN Advertising Project has gathered, processed , coded, and made available to the scholarly community tracking data originally collected by TNS Media Intelligence/Campaign Media Analysis Group (CMAG).1 This commercial firm specializes in providing detailed , real-time tracking information to corporate and political clients. Such information is employed by candidates and corporations seeking market-level information on where their opponents are advertising and what they are saying. It also enables candidates and corporations to verify that the ads they paid for indeed have been broadcast by a television station at the time promised. These tracking data represent the most comprehensive and systematic collection on the content and targeting of political advertisements ever assembled for a given election. The data include two types of information. First, frequency information tells when and where ads aired with precise details on the date, time, market, station, and television show. Figure 4.1 illustrates the raw targeting information (in this case, a series of ads by the Bush campaign aired in March 2004). Second, the data provide information about each ad’s content, including text and images, in the form of a “storyboard” created by TNS Media Intelligence /CMAG for each unique ad. A storyboard from the same Bush ad is shown in Figure 4.2. The storyboard contains transcripts of all audio and a still capture of every fourth second of video. TNS Media Intelligence/CMAG gathers such data by using a market-based tracking system, deploying “Media Watch” in each of the 100 largest media markets in the United States. In addition to all local advertising activity, these detectors track advertisements on the major national networks as well as national cable networks. The system’s software recognizes the electronic seams between FIGURE 4.1 Example of Advertising Targeting Data from TNSMI/CMAG 38 C H A P T E R F O U R PRES/BUSH FORWARD Brand: BUSH FOR PRESIDENT (B331) Parent: BUSH FOR PRESIDENT COMMITTEE Aired: 03/11/2004 - 03/13/2004 Creative Id: 3323470 [Bush] "Over the past three years, Americans have faced many serious challenges. Now we face a choice. We can go forward with confidence, resolve, and hope, or we can turn back to the dangerous illusion that terrorists are not plotting and outlaw regimes are no threat. We can continue to create jobs, reform education, and lower the cost of healthcare. Together, we're moving America forward. I'm George W. Bush and I approved this message." [Approved by President Bush and paid for by Bush-Cheney 2004, Inc.] Copyright 2004 TNS Media Intelligence/CMAG www.PoliticsOnTV.com 1- 866-559-CMAG FIGURE 4.2 Example of Storyboard from TNSMI/CMAG programming and advertising and identifies the “digital fingerprints” of specific advertisements. When the system does not recognize the fingerprints of a particular spot, the advertisement is captured and downloaded. Thereafter, the system automatically recognizes and logs that particular commercial wherever and whenever it airs. The Wisconsin Advertising Project coded virtually every political advertisement broadcast in the top 75 markets in 2000 and in the top 101 media T R A C K I N G T H E V O L U M E A N D C O N T E N T 39 markets from 2001 to 2004. In this process, teams of coders documented the advertisement’s tone (positive, negative, or contrast), objective (issue ad or election spot), and sponsorship (party, candidate, or interest group). The coders also recorded the issues raised in the ad, the presence of commonly used adjectives, and a number of other attributes. (The complete coding sheets for 2000 and 2004 can be found in Appendixes D and E.) To create the complete dataset, the coded data from storyboards were merged with a larger dataset containing information about the market, time, and show on which every ad was broadcast. In the final dataset, the unit of analysis is the individual airing of a single ad, or a “broadcast instance.” This means that a given ad produced by a campaign may appear dozens, even hundreds of times in the dataset. Each case also contains information about the date and time of the ad’s airing, the television station and program on which it was broadcast, and the complete coding of its content. These data improve on the six approaches to political advertisement analysis discussed in Chapter 3...

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