Some Thoughts on TV Ads in Relation To Political Campaigning

I had a long piece prepared, and it might still go up, about the lack of endorsements from some key players in our coalition in relation to Francesca Hong's loss (remember, not endorsing someone can also be a political power move). But one thing I've been told is that she didn't purchase any TV ads, and I want to touch on this for just a brief moment.

I work a minimum wage job. There is a TV, and it plays the local news. There's multiple TVs in fact, and they play multiple local news stations. The local news, on commercial break, is always playing political ads. I am the young audience that Hong was targeting with her campaign. In my local sphere, a lot of the politicians I know are running, I know are running because I've seen their ridiculous political attack ads at work. Lots of "men in girl's sports" and "protect our kids from the trans menace" in these ads here in Florida!

If I look back on the jobs I've held, nearly every one of em had a TV somewhere on the job that played the local news. Whether that was working at Whataburger, where the front lobby had a TV playing the news so anyone at the front counter could see it, or working in tech, an office, a hotel, a restaurant, a bar, there is always a TV tuned to the local news. Even working at Wal-mart they had one in the breakroom and of course the electronics section.

The point is, you think you're not reaching people because who is watching TV? I don't watch television. I have not turned on a television willingly in some time. I just use my computer to stream, right? Why would I watch TV when I can just use my laptop? But I don't have my laptop at work. At work you can constantly hear the news playing in the corner of your ear. At work I see these political attack ads. That's how I know who's running in my local area. Despite the fact that you'd think that cable TV ads would never reach someone in my demographic.

So here we have someone running on a very pro-working class policy campaign, and they're not running ads in the place where workers are most likely to see them, even if it's just by happenstance or by chance. At the same time, the opponent is almost certainly running political attack ads on Hong on television. So now she's absent from the conversation, and the only time you hear her name is when she's under attack. With no counter-narrative, the opponent gets to define the narrative by default. The worker who is the captive audience for the cable news pundit while they work their service job is not hearing these working class policies presented in their labor environment. The message of the campaign would hit even harder when the people you're addressing standing in the very conditions the ad claims to tackle.

When we think of television ads in relation to a campaign, we think, why would we do that? Most people are looking at TikTok. Most people are going home and turning on Tubi. From what I was told, she bought Tubi ads. Like I said, you wouldn't expect these cable TV ads to reach someone in my demo, but they do because there's a missing pillar: all of the people who see a TV when they're at work, which is a lot of people. If your policies are directly speaking to the working class, think about it. Someone at a job they only keep for the healthcare catches your ad talking about healthcare, and they're going to be much more compelled to vote for you than if they're at home, turning on a Tubi movie, then a commercial break hits, they get up and go to the kitchen, and they never even see your ad because you're hitting them when they're already disengaged. At home, advertising can be skipped, ignored, muted, or encountered while the viewer is doing something else, advertising during leisure viewing is fundamentally different than advertising seen while in a labor setting. At work, the television may be part of the physical environment for an entire shift, with no individual control over programming, I literally cannot turn off the local Fox News station.

One of the reasons I even pay attention to what's on the work TV is because I'm at work. There's really nothing else to pay attention to.

Just some food for thought.