Earned Media

January 26, 2016 9:20 AM

After sifting through more than 100,000 hours of broadcast television coverage and counting, the Internet Archive last week launched its new, free Political TV Ad Archive website —PoliticalAdArchive.org — with more than 30,000 ad airings archived. This new resource will bring journalists, researchers, and the public resources to help hold politicians accountable for the messages they deliver in TV ads.

Alongside the ads the Archive lists details about when and where they aired (also downloadable in CSV format.) Site partners the Center for Responsive Politics and Politifact are providing sponsor and subject metadata.

The ads are identified by team members or their "Duplitron" software (an open source project based on Columbia University's audfprint.)

posted by ChurchHatesTucker (12 comments total)

Thanks for the link, very interesting...
posted by Alexandra Kitty at 9:23 AM on January 26, 2016

Man, I really should donate to IA someday. Such a fucking treasure.
posted by symbioid at 9:32 AM on January 26, 2016 [5 favorites]

It is naive to believe political figures can be held accountable for ads used during campaigns. At best, a political opponent can contrast statement that a figure uses or has used to what he or she later says. But then it is up to voters to decide. How often do we know that our choice has contradicted himself and yet vote for him ?
posted by Postroad at 9:33 AM on January 26, 2016 [2 favorites]

...to help hold politicians accountable for the messages they deliver in TV ads.

LOL.

oh...they're serious?
posted by Thorzdad at 9:34 AM on January 26, 2016 [1 favorite]

Small steps are still steps.
posted by Etrigan at 9:40 AM on January 26, 2016 [8 favorites]

I'd love to see something similar for political email subscriptions. A huge amount of campaigning happens over email "blasts" these days, but it's basically invisible to anyone who doesn't maintain hundreds of subscriptions to high volume newsletters. I'd love to be able to search through a public archive of email campaigns sent out by specific politicians or groups.
posted by simonw at 9:43 AM on January 26, 2016 [4 favorites]

As a satirist this is great!

For a while now I've wanted to get sound clips of the various things Trump and King say and then have a puppet say them, with a tagline of, "If it sounds stupid coming from the mouth of a puppet…why do you give this guy a pass?" But getting the audio has always been a bit problematic.
posted by cjorgensen at 9:45 AM on January 26, 2016 [2 favorites]

I find it kind of strange that many ads air for a day or two in San Francisco and then move to heavy rotation in Iowa or Boston. Is that maybe just a function of the fingerprinting technology and the available data? (or is that what really happens?)
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 9:45 AM on January 26, 2016

Implementation details are forthcoming, but there's some weird stuff out there. There's a Martin O'Malley ad that apparently only airs in Philadelphia.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 9:57 AM on January 26, 2016

I find no entries for Honest Gil Fulbright. Perhaps his ads haven't aired on TV, so their exclusion from PoliticalAdArchive.org is understandable.
posted by Snerd at 10:35 AM on January 26, 2016

How often do we know that our choice has contradicted himself and yet vote for him ?

If we were to abide by that simple statement, we could vote for no one. And it is not even always a sign of dishonesty to go against something one once literally said: context matters for a lot, not to mention people are allowed to change their minds over time.
posted by JHarris at 12:33 PM on January 26, 2016 [1 favorite]

University of Oklahoma has more historic materials.
posted by Ideefixe at 8:40 PM on January 26, 2016 [1 favorite]