DAVID SCHWEIDEL, professor of marketing, Emory University’s Goizueta Business School

During the COVID-19 pandemic, consumers are spending more time on digital platforms than watching television, so political campaigns are simply “following the eyeballs,” David Schweidel says.

“When we think about the rallies and the events that candidates hold, the debates to rooms full of people … that ability to gather people has been lost this year, the ability to have the ground game, to have retail politics, if you will. That’s where the digital platforms potentially can play a major role.”

But if the purpose of any political campaign is to persuade voters, Schweidel says digital campaign strategies can still be boiled down to basic marketing principles: identifying audience segments; determining what matters to consumers (voters, in this case); crafting a message to produce an outcome — voting or donating to a campaign — and deciding when and where to share it. 

When campaigns have to rely more on digital platforms, because of the sheer volume of data they also have an ability to microtarget specific messages to different audiences, he says. “It’s a more effective way of reaching that consumer — easier to measure and assess if it’s working,” he says. 

The downside? With targeted messaging on social media, voters tend to see only advertising that resonates with their own worldview. “The algorithms will reinforce those existing beliefs,” he acknowledges. “There’s not going to be a lot of cross-pollination of alternative viewpoints.”

That’s a result of both consumer targeting and the way platforms are designed, which is to hold our interest with content that engages us and that we agree with. In that way, “it really does reinforce those (political) echo chambers,” Schweidel says.

And while he credits platforms such as Facebook for moving toward more transparency and accountability in managing political advertising — recognizing faults, forming an advisory board, taking steps to address challenges — he doesn’t think the media giant has gone far enough.

Although Facebook has vowed to not accept U.S.-based paid political advertising the week preceding the Nov. 3 election and for an indefinite period of time after the polls close, “everything leading up to that is open season,” Schweidel says. “They’re not doing enough to ensure information posted online is accurate.”

“Unfortunately, we can’t do fact-checking in real time,” he adds. “It’s a game of whack-a-mole — stop one post and another (platform) will be recycling the same message. And those messages travel very quickly.”

In the end, politicians, like marketers, are using what works. Over the years, Schweidel’s research has found that — as much as we may hate them — negative campaign ads prove effective in mobilizing voters, and he only expects to see them intensify in the final weeks of the presidential race.

David Schweidel is co-author of “Social Media Intelligence” (2014) and author of “Profiting from the Data Economy” (2015). Learn more about him here.