YouTube campaign videos are more positive than ads aired on television, a new U-M study indicates.
YouTube videos are more positive because they are targeted narrowly to the well-informed and highly motivated, usually supportive people who view a candidate’s online video, says Rob Salmond, the study’s author and assistant professor of political science.
“Informing and inspiring supporters is a task well suited to YouTube videos,” Salmond says about the study, which recently was released by the Brookings Institute.
Attacking an opponent, he says, is more effectively done on TV because weak supporters of a candidate’s opponent — the usual target for negative advertising — are more likely to watch the candidate’s TV spot than to watch the candidate’s YouTube video.
The study involved analysis of more than 3,100 YouTube videos uploaded during the election campaigns by 72 parties in 12 countries.
Campaigners for high office tend to be more negative on TV than on YouTube, both in the United States and in other democracies. In the 2008 presidential campaign, the Obama YouTube videos that also likely appeared on TV mostly were attack ads against John McCain (56 percent), whereas the YouTube-only ads most often were positive messages about Obama (73 percent). The McCain campaign overall was more negative in tone, and this tendency was substantially starker in the YouTube-and-TV videos (68 percent negative) than in the YouTube-only videos (52 percent negative).
Even among the negative ads, there is a difference in tone on YouTube. Among the YouTube only videos he examined, 78 percent attacked opponents purely on the basis of their positions on issues. The remaining 22 percent introduced a significant element of character attack in addition to any policy-based criticism. On TV, however, the proportion of attack ads featuring character-based attacks jumped from 22 percent to more than 38 percent.
Salmond said the audience for YouTube ads is younger, richer, more educated, more politically interested and more partisan than the population at large. In other countries, these differences likely are even more stark, because the United States has a much higher reported use of the Internet for political purposes than do most other democracies, he says.
YouTube also makes it easier to distribute longer, more detailed content than previously was possible, because while long-form political infomercials on television are almost prohibitively expensive, YouTube is nearly free.
“YouTube provides a substantially more cost effective means of providing detailed information to those who seek it than does TV,” he wrote.
Negative ads on TV also appear to have more emotional appeals than do negative ads appearing only on YouTube.
More than half of the TV attack advertisements Salmond examined contained strong fear appeals, compared to less than a quarter of the YouTube-only negative ads. And while 41 percent of the YouTube-only attack videos contained no fear appeal at all, only 16 percent of the negative TV ads did the same.
