Both the Clinton campaign and Our Principals PAC have made ads in the last several weeks highlighting strong women. Clinton’s ad is positive and promotional, highlighting Clinton’s strengths as a woman and comparing her to fictional women we see on popular television shows. The PAC ad is a pure and direct attack on Trump. SpotCheck tested the effectiveness of this pair of ads twice – once before abortion became an issue during an interview between Donald Trump and Jake Tapper and once after.
Both ads were more effective at engaging and moving voters after Trump made comments about punishing women who have illegal abortions relative to their effectiveness before he made these statements, which shows the importance of campaign context shaping an ad’s effectiveness. The ads had more pop among the electorate because of what was happening in the campaign at that moment.
Which of these approaches worked better?
The PAC ad was consistently and significantly better at changing people’s opinions of the candidates. While Clinton’s ad lowered her unfavorables by nine points relative to those in a control group who saw no political ads, it only raised her favorables by 1 point. The PAC ad effectively drove down Trump’s favorables by 12 points and raised his unfavorables by 10 points relative to the control group. It also had a much higher level of overall emotional engagement, generating 30 percent more reactions than the Clinton ad, which starred Hollywood writer and producer Shonda Rhimes alongside her three strong female protagonists, Ellen Pompeo (Grey’s Anatomy), Kerry Washington (Scandal), and Viola Davis (How to Get Away with Murder). The PAC ad presented average-appearing women reading real quotes from Trump about women – all negative.
The ads also had clearly different gender effects.
Raters were engaged with the PAC ad throughout it’s minute long content, but the Clinton ad showed a significant increase in negative affect in its 32 second, with nearly half of those watching the ad suddenly indicating they disliked its content. The 32nd second of this ad is the moment when the popular actresses stop talking about the characters they play on television and transition to politics, saying, “In the real world … in the real world, there’s Hilary Clinton.” It seems some people don’t like it when politics bleeds into entertainment — but more importantly, attacking Trump on his views of women appears more effective than promoting a female candidate as a strong woman.
The Clinton ad’s SpotCheck score: -190 before Trump’s comments; 500 after.
The Trump ad’s SpotCheck score: 181 before Trump’s comments; 783 after.