How Can AI Make Political Advertising More Powerful?
Throughout history, political campaigns have evolved in tandem with new media platforms, from the rise of radio broadcasting in the 1920s to the proliferation of the internet and social media in the 21st century. In recent years, data analytics and microtargeting tools have become the bedrock of modern campaigning. Campaigns now rely on large data sets that offer detailed insights into citizens’ behaviors, interests, and whereabouts in order to advance their key goals, such as voter mobilization and fundraising. Yet using this wealth of data to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time demands considerable labor and expertise, as well as precision tools. And this data-driven targeting is not perfect: campaigns sometimes end up delivering the wrong message or targeting the wrong person. AI has the potential to make data-driven tools even more powerful and accessible.
Targeting Specific Audiences
From a campaign perspective, AI’s ability to synthesize information about a target audience and generate a persuasive message tailored to that audience’s interests holds great promise for microtargeting efforts. Free AI tools, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Bing, and Google’s Bard, are each capable of producing relevant, comprehensive, and sophisticated marketing copy for a target audience. What’s more, such tools can accomplish this task on a massive scale. AI can fine-tune messages for a diverse array of voter groups and their subgroups, and it can execute these refinements hundreds if not thousands of times daily.
For a political campaign wanting to address the unique concerns of different voters — such as women worried about reproductive health care costs, young voters newly participating in the democratic process, parents unsure about educational opportunities for their children, or rural communities facing problems with limited infrastructure — AI can feasibly assist in developing and targeting messages that address all these concerns and more. Indeed, this year, major platforms like Meta and Google have begun implementing AI-powered tools for advertisers that aim to make the personalization of ad messages easier and more efficient.
Empowering Less-Resourced Campaigns
AI can be especially helpful to political campaigns with fewer financial resources. Well-funded, high-profile campaigns can usually afford sizeable digital teams capable of disseminating a large volume of targeted ads; smaller, less moneyed campaigns have historically been unable to compete in this area. The current AI landscape, with its multitude of low-cost and user-friendly tools that require no prior knowledge of coding or machine learning, disrupts that equation. Low-resource campaign teams can harness this accessibility going forward and outsource targeted advertising production to these tools. Furthermore, AI-generated content can rival the sophistication of big-budget campaigns, giving smaller campaigns a boost in competing with larger ones.
Improving Ad Effectiveness
AI’s adroitness at tailoring messaging could make ads more effective at engaging audiences. Although recent academic work has cast doubt on how good political campaigns actually are at persuading voters to support particular candidates or initiatives, the bulk of digital campaign efforts lie in mobilizing supporters to perform certain actions, such as donating or turning out on Election Day. AI’s ability to generate well-reasoned political arguments tightly aligned with a target audience’s preferences stands to improve the overall effectiveness of such political microtargeting efforts. Indeed, some early evidence suggests that voters find AI-generated microtargeted ads fairly convincing and even favor AI-crafted political arguments over human-crafted ones, primarily due to AI’s ability to generate easy-to-read, fact-driven arguments that are more positive in tone.
{Categories} _Category: Applications{/Categories}
{URL}https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/generative-ai-political-advertising{/URL}
{Author}unknown{/Author}
{Image}https://ic-cdn.flipboard.com/brennancenter.org/5c344a42d4efb45ae3a8f08eb9b865356994adb1/_xlarge.jpeg{/Image}
{Keywords}Computer Science,Artificial Intelligence,Business,Viral Marketing,Marketing{/Keywords}
{Source}Applications{/Source}
{Thumb}{/Thumb}