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Unidentified Anchor: Let's take a look at the North Carolina polls and this will give you an understanding of just how close the presidential race is in the great state of North Carolina, in the Tar Heel State.
Anisa Khalifa: Right now, North Carolina is the center of the American political universe. Everywhere you turn, there’s a political ad.
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Unidentified Speakers: North Carolina families struggle. everything costs more now…it makes me so mad that billionaires pay less in taxes than I do…
Anisa Khalifa: On the TV, the radio, your cell phone. It doesn’t matter. You can't escape it.
Unidentified Speaker: It is, like jazz, one of the real unique American art forms.
Anisa Khalifa: And it’s a fascinating world, but it’s also, honestly, kind of terrifying.
Unidentified Speaker: AI has taken a leap forward that I think has scared a lot of us.
Anisa Khalifa: I’m Anisa Khalifa. You’re listening to The Broadside, where we tell stories from our home at the crossroads of the South. This week, we explore the art, science and shadowy business behind political advertising. I know next to nothing about political advertising. Thankfully, I work with an expert.
Hey, how are you doing?
Colin Campbell: Hey, Anisa. How's it going?
Anisa Khalifa: Yeah, I'm good. How are you?
Colin Campbell: Good. Staying super busy with this crazy election season.
Anisa Khalifa: Yeah, great to see you.
Based in Raleigh, Colin Campbell is the Capital Bureau Chief for WUNC. He’s the ultimate North Carolina politics insider.
So tell me where you are calling me from right now.
Colin Campbell: So I am in our legislative, uh, basement bunker studio at the bottom of the legislative building, um, surrounded by cinder blocks and in what's sort of a glorified closet next to the cubicles where all the press sit, but it's, uh, it gets you close to the action if nothing else.
Anisa Khalifa: Nice. And, you know, obviously we're in this crazy election season, we're being bombarded by political ads left and right. Give us, like, an overview of what's going on in terms of political advertising this campaign season.
Colin Campbell: It's just so much because North Carolina is a swing state. You've got millions upon millions being dropped by the major campaigns. It's really hard to have any advertising even stand out. It just all turns into kind of noise. At this point, people are getting, you know, mountains of mailers in their home mailboxes. They're seeing TV ads every time they turn on, you know, any channel they might possibly be watching. You can't even get a break on Wheel of Fortune these days. Um, so, you know, it's, it's a lot to deal with.
Anisa Khalifa: And we wanted to actually, maybe cut through a little of that noise and figure out what's actually happening. So, where should we start? Who should we talk to?
Colin Campbell: Yeah, so finding the people who are behind these ads is actually really tricky. Uh, this is not like a movie or a TV show where you can look at the credits at the end and think, Oh, okay, that's the director of this. This was a good one. I should, to check out that person. You know, it's really hard even looking at the campaigns to find out, you know, who the political operatives that are actually managing the campaigns are, much less the contractor that they've hired to actually do the work of putting together these ads. So when you talk about people who are, uh, you know, in this world and who sort of the masters of the art form are, one of the names that always comes up is Frank Eaton. When I was a young boy,
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Unidentified Anchor: It's the viral campaign ad turning heads across the country.
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Unidentified Speaker: The KKK announced a night rally in my home county.
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Unidentified Anchor: …candidate's campaign ad going viral. The ad from North Carolina's Charles Graham recounts what happened. When the KKK came to his county in 1958…
Anisa Khalifa: Amazing. So it sounds like we definitely need to talk to him then.
Colin Campbell: Yeah, I think he can show you what the artistry is like behind these, and how you manage to break through this crazy amount of noise with something that really will stick in voters' minds, and not just be something they tune out as they wait for their favorite TV show to come back on.
Anisa Khalifa: Frank Eaton handles every aspect of campaign ad making. He’s a script writer, cinematographer, director… and while he’s based here in North Carolina, Frank works all over the country. And he’s been busy this year. In fact, when we originally reached out to him he was in North Dakota wrapping up a production for a congressional campaign.
Welcome. Thanks so much for coming to talk to me.
Frank Eaton: Thank you for having me.
Anisa Khalifa: So, you know, this is such a strange and hyper specific line of work. How did you get into this? Did you grow up wanting to do this?
Frank Eaton: I did not grow up wanting to be a political ad maker. No, I, I mean, I was always kind of a political junkie as a kid growing up in the Reagan administration. I'm a Democrat today. I grew up loving Ronald Reagan just because the presentation was so entertaining. I mean, that, that I think is, you know, sort of those of us who are in it now cannot escape that origin there, that politics was presented as entertainment to the American people. And then I was also very interested in Saturday Night Live at the time and all the political satire that was so great in the 80s and 90s and then kind of drifted away, went to film school, really, you know, kind of dug into the storytelling aspect of other stuff, fiction. And then I got into documentary and that just kind of led me back to politics in 2007. And I've been in it ever since.
Anisa Khalifa: So what are the fundamentals of making a compelling political ad? Is there like a formula? Are there different types? Can you lay that out for me?
Frank Eaton: The formula is, I mean, I don't even have to explain the formula. I think everybody sees it four million times a day. You know, it's the narrator voice.
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Unidentified Speaker: Today, more men and women will go to work than ever before in our country's history.
Frank Eaton: Music is often part of the formula, uh, music I think is like, a huge piece of the creative element of these ads.
Unidentified Speaker: It's morning again in America.
Frank Eaton: It dictates the tone of something. Just like in movies or, or TV, the music is telling you how you feel about it. For me, the formula doesn't work simply because it allows people not to think about what they're hearing. People can clock politics and political messaging very quickly. And when you bring them a political ad that looks like a political ad, they clock it and they tune it out a lot. Or they say, I'm going to stick this in that little cubby hole in my brain that is for political messaging. You really don't want them to do that.
Anisa Khalifa: So what makes something memorable in that atmosphere, where you just have so much coming at you all the time?
Frank Eaton: I think that stickiness or memorability in politics is all about defying expectations. It's all about bringing a different tone or a different bit of imagery to a political conversation. I think the secret is to go into making a political ad by not thinking about it as making a political ad, and then what you have to do after you have this great idea is simplify it down to a point where everybody can process it.
That, I think, is the most difficult thing, and why most political ads look pretty much the same, because it is all about clarity at the end of the day, but I think you make something interesting and then you have your strategic brain come in and say, does this function, how does this hurt us, how does this hurt the other side, what are the trade-offs here. Because you can't build the perfect spot, there's just no such thing, you're always losing and alienating somebody. If you're not alienating somebody, it's too bland, now you shouldn't go out and hurt people, but you can certainly talk to your audience.
Anisa Khalifa: How do statistics and data inform what you create? Like, how does that inform what you're doing?
Frank Eaton: You can't ignore data in political ad making. It is the foundation of where you start, but it's not the journey, it's not how you write. Essentially, the polling tells you who you're talking to, so you get that person locked in your brain, and you write to them a story or a narrative or an argument that is interesting to you and them in a conversation. It's, it's got to be conversational. The best ads are conversational.
You look at the data, you forget the data, you do your work, then you go back and run the ad through the data again to make sure you haven't wandered off too far. Because what you will get is something that's much more interesting. And that will hit people in ways that maybe they didn't expect. I think the best strategists do understand that there are limits to the data. Especially when what you need to do is make big gains in a race and really change hearts. There is something to the heart that we gotta talk to.
Anisa Khalifa: Right, and you're talking about, you know, how you change someone's heart. I mean, anecdotally, as a viewer, a lot of times it can feel like a lot of these ads are preaching to the choir, you know? So how can you tell when an ad is actually working? Can you tell? How, how do they work? When do they work? Do they work?
Frank Eaton: Ironically, the only way to tell if an ad is working is to poll it — this is why we still make friends with pollsters — or to have an election.
Anisa Khalifa: But before we get to that election, we'll talk to someone who can break down the numbers and the data for us. Coming up after the break — AI, big data, and the future of political admaking.
Brian Lewis: To get a well-done ad produced, it could take you anywhere from 25 to 50 thousand dollars.
Anisa Khalifa: Brian Lewis is the co-host of the Do Politics Better podcast. He’s worked on political campaigns for Democrats and Republicans. These days, he’s a partner at New Frame, a bipartisan strategic communications firm based in Raleigh.
Brian Lewis: And I'm a lobbyist at the North Carolina General Assembly. I've been working in politics since 1994.
Anisa Khalifa: In that time, he’s witnessed a boom in the political strategy and ad-making industries. And one major development stands out.
Brian Lewis: The professionalization of it. So, look, there are people that you call who do nothing but opposition research now. You contract with them. So, he's the guy that goes out and hangs out in courthouses. He reads every word of your divorce from 1986, your child custody, your Income tax records and that's all he does, is research and the pollsters I mean the polling now John Locke foundation, they're your conservative pollster Public policy polling, they're your liberal pollster and those industries just did not exist 30, 40 years ago, or at least the way they exist now. Full time jobs, full firms. This is what they do. They're right here in Raleigh, or in Durham, or Chapel Hill, or wherever. And so those two lanes, the opposition research, the polling, that feeds into what your ad is going to be in modern politics.
Anisa Khalifa: I think most people have a general idea of the concept behind polling. But just how granular is the data that campaigns use?
Brian Lewis: Every one of us, including you, including me, there is an index of 0 to 100, based on our likelihood of voting for a certain candidate or not. Now, a lot of this, there's another industry that has popped up in the last, I'd say, 10 to 15 years, and that is data mining based on our purchases that we make at the grocery store, that VIC card you use at your grocery store, very important customer, where you get a 10 percent discount. It's tracking your buying, and so what you're buying there, but more important, you're probably thinking, well, what, I buy milk and bread at the grocery store.
What if I told you we also know what you're buying on Amazon? We know what, uh, surveys you're taking online. We know what you like on Facebook. We know what you don't like on X or Twitter. We know what you've posted on Instagram because all of that data gets funneled in and sold to campaigns so that they can target us.
Anisa Khalifa: Can people actually find out what their profile is, what their data is that these companies are looking at?
Brian Lewis: If you have access to this file, you would have to buy it. That would be interesting. I don't know that you can.
Anisa Khalifa: But say we don't have an insider contact like you, Brian.
Brian Lewis: Yeah, I don't know. I don't know how you'd find it. These companies, it's somewhat proprietary, and they're purchasing it from Food Lion and iTunes and Amazon and Toyota and And they are making an index that's sellable. And by the way, both sides of the aisle does this.
Anisa Khalifa: This year’s North Carolina governor's race has been notable for a lot of reasons, but one development in particular caught my eye and it's the use of artificial intelligence. A PAC recently created an anti-Mark Robinson ad using his likeness.
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Unidentified Anchor: Artificial intelligence is the newest technology one Raleigh man is using to try to sway your vote away from a candidate for governor. It's believed to be the first fully AI-generated ad campaign in North Carolina. While the images are fake, Stiefel says all the claims in the ad are ones Robinson has posted or said in the past, this now bringing attention to a…
Anisa Khalifa: Where’s that going? What does that mean for political advertising?
Brian Lewis: There's always been kind of these, let's just call them dirty tricks. I'm putting air quotes around that. That's what folks call them in the industry. Oh, this is just dirty tricks. AI has taken a leap forward that I think has scared a lot of us. Where we see Mark Robinson's mouth moving in this digital ad, and it sounds like his voice saying these words, but it's computer generated. I've heard from legislators, both sides of the aisle, that say we need to do something about this. We need to regulate this because we seem to have crossed over a line and it's become so easy. Now, this is basically the doctoring of someone, what they're saying and how they're saying it. We're hearing their words.
Where we think AI is going two election cycles from now, five election cycles from now — is AI going to replace polling? Is AI going to replace even opposition research? Are we going to use AI so that you get an ad that's different for me based on what AI knows about what our computer use is. So I told you that there's this index of 0 to 100 based on our computer use. What if AI could go in and track — what if AI knows who you are and your online profile and what you like to read and you get that message from a campaign and it's all AI-generated? This is the new frontier. What if, and none of that is truthful, by the way, what we get sent. It's just based on what they think we want to hear based on our online activity.
Anisa Khalifa: I've seen some reports from a research organization that said they're predicting a record 12. 3 billion are going to be spent in this election cycle. How much money is going to be spent on political ads out of that number?
Brian Lewis: My goodness, I would say 80 90 percent of it,
Anisa Khalifa: Really?
Brian Lewis: Yeah. And, and so here's the thing is that it's hard to, we can track the campaign donations to the Josh Stein campaign and the Mark Robinson campaign. You can see who's given to them and at what it mounts what we're not tracking what's off the books. And so a lot of the numbers you cited are, are somewhat estimates, because we have huge loopholes that have been created since 2009. Most of the money is dark money, and that's a word that's used a lot. But what it means is you're giving money off the books to the independent expenditures out there that are Swift Boat Veterans for America, the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, the Republican Governors Association.
Anisa Khalifa: Yeah, so you're not directly contributing to the candidate, but it's understood that that's what that money is for, and that's where it ends up going.
Brian Lewis: Yes, and just to show you, your listeners can go to YouTube right now and go to Ted Budd for North Carolina Senate B reel, just Google that in YouTube. Ted Budd for Senate B reel. He has 20 minutes of him online, of him fishing, talking to old people, visiting a fire station, visiting a teacher, uh, going to church. There's no sound to it. He wants the independent expenditure to take those images and create ads. It's there just for the independent expenditures.
Anisa Khalifa: Huh.
Brian Lewis: Yeah.
Anisa Khalifa: So, and are these independent expenditures, are these like political action committees? Okay.
Brian Lewis: Yeah. There's a whole world out here that I think a lot of people don't know exist.
Anisa Khalifa: And what about here in North Carolina? Like how much of that 12.3 billion estimate do you think is going to be spent here in North Carolina?
Brian Lewis: Oh my goodness. You know, I hesitate to give a number, but I would think a big plurality is earmarked for North Carolina, then Pennsylvania, then Georgia.
Anisa Khalifa: Wow.
Brian Lewis: Yeah.
Anisa Khalifa: That's, that's wild.
Brian Lewis: Buckle up.
Anisa Khalifa: I'm already reeling from what's happened in the last couple of weeks, honestly.
Brian Lewis: We all are, aren't we?
Anisa Khalifa: So in terms of who gets that money, when this, you know, ad spend is made, who gets that money? Where does that money go? Like, what's the breakdown of, you know, people making it, um, the places where it's being put on these platforms.
Brian Lewis: Yeah, so your biggest takers of the money are, you know, your TV stations. Talk to a TV station right now and see if they have any ad space for you to talk about your air conditioning business. I mean, it is being sopped up by the campaign. So, obviously, this is a great, uh, great season to own a TV radio station, but you're also seeing the digital side of it. There's more and more microtargeting going on at the digital level. So you know, if you're, if you're trying to watch last night's highlights of the Sunday night football game, you got to put up with a 30 second ad probably right now from a political campaign. So the YouTubes are making, Google is making money.
It should be pointed out that campaign managers, the folks doing your ad buys are taking a percentage of the money. So we've heard estimates of anywhere up to 10 percent goes to placing an ad. So they're making the money. There's also the folks who, who make our ads, you know, it is a good time to be a cinematographer, to work a camera, to do storyboarding, the whole production team. You know, this is their full time job, whether in North Carolina or in our country, who go around making ads. And they're certainly a part of it. But I have found, though, that they're the least compensated.
Anisa Khalifa: So is approximately 12.3 billion dollars in a single election cycle, do you think that's a reasonable amount of money to spend?
Brian Lewis: No, I think that's unreasonable. There is no reason. Think about what we could do with twelve billion dollars. We could fund all of North Carolina's public education system with 12 billion, that is the budget for public education in North Carolina. Think about the folks we could feed with 12 billion dollars. And I'm, look, I know elections, you know, they have to happen and we have to have campaigns. But it does seem like a waste.
Anisa Khalifa: And that seems to be the catch-22 of political ads — our democracy doesn't run without them, but they aren't exactly a force for good, either. Ad maker Frank Eaton says the money is an inescapable part of the picture.
Frank Eaton: Politics and democracy employ a lot of people. I am one of them. I'm not one of the wealthy ones, but I do make a decent living making political media for the American people. Politics is a business. And our democracy is now mediated by how much money you are spending.
Anisa Khalifa: Frank, given all this, should we be more cynical? Should we be more discerning when we watch political ads?
Frank Eaton: Absolutely. I mean, I think everything, every time an American turns on a device and takes in a piece of media, they need to be cynical and discerning about what they are looking at. If people were more cynical and more discerning about what they saw on their TVs and on their phones, our democracy would be healthier. It is all paid for, people. It's all paid for. Mic drop. That's all I can say about it. It's, it is a industry. American democracy is an industry.
Anisa Khalifa: This episode of the Broadside was produced by me – Anisa Khalifa – and our editor Jerad Walker. Wilson Sayre is our executive producer. Special thanks this week goes out to WUNC’s Colin Campbell. If you want to know anything about North Carolina politics, check out his work on the WUNC Politics Podcast.
The Broadside is a production of WUNC–North Carolina Public Radio and is part of the NPR network. You can email us at broadside@wunc.org. If you enjoyed the show, leave us a rating, a review, or share it with a friend! Thanks for listening y'all. We'll be back next week.