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The strongest argument to me for the overall effectiveness of political advertising, is that the opposite is to claim all the professional politicians don't know their jobs. That they're all raising and then wasting massive amount of money on nothing. Isn't this exactly the sort of situation where everyone is supposed to derisively shout "Dunning-Kruger!" at anyone contradicting the real experts? (i.e., those people who have actually won elections). This actually seems to be a classic situation of that type - those who have the strongest empirical results and the most stake in an outcome have a very strong consensus on a model, are told they are wrong by a bunch of pundits and think-tankers using very poor theoretical research. In a different social context, I suspect this arrangement would lead to much mockery by the chattering class.

Now, the above is not absolute proof (practioners can be wrong). But I find it much worth pondering.

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Don’t discount the self-interest of those selling advertising space and those making the ads: they will try to persuade the politicians that ads work. So we look to the academics to do the research. Which seems to show it isn’t actually that effective.

The old saying about 50% of advertising spend being wasted remains true. For politics, it might even be higher.

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Yes, indeed, it's possible, practitioners can be wrong. But there's an enormous amount of bad academic research too, especially the more one gets into psychology and social sciences. Hence my heuristic - who has "skin in the game"? What's the view of the experts as defined by the people who have actually succeeded - repeatedly! - in the task? How does one reconcile any differences? An assertion along the lines of "Every *empirically* *successful* practitioner is a deluded fool, the entire lot of them, as shown by those who haven't the foggiest familiarity with doing it, but almost exclusively theorize about it" - again, in a different context, it seems that'd draw howls of derision as "epistemic closure" for ideological reason, or some such.

Now, it's certainly possible to waste a huge amount of money on anything, and absolutely there's scammers everywhere. But by analogy, there's a big difference in saying that a particular investment isn't worthwhile (e.g. cryptocurrency?) versus investment itself never works. I suspect Facebook and Twitter are way overrated because they are obsessions of chatters (and some are especially furious because they lost factional control of Twitter). But the overall topic just strikes me as very badly discussed.

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