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A Data Study: What are the Candidates Saying to Me?
What are the candidates saying to me with their advertising? I’ve been collecting data on video ads for some time, and recently notice an uptick in political ads from candidates in the past few months. Makes sense. After all, the Democratic Primaries are in full swing.
Having grown up in Northern California and living in San Francisco, I know the candidates are busy elsewhere in the country. They’re busy building up support for their campaigns in other states, with earlier primaries than California’s. We don’t really see much of the candidates at this point. Most of what I’ve seen of them so far, has been in the debates and in comedy show interviews. I’ve also been seeing the words they use in their online advertisements.
I decided to take a closer look at the last two months of data I’ve been collecting on YouTube video ads, and dig into the text of those ads. My first experiment with visualizing this data takes the form of word clouds. The bigger the text in the cloud, the more often it occurs in the source text.
From Elizabeth Warren’s team, I’ve been seeing the same banner ad repeatedly. It’s on a light green background, and the text says “Voter survey: Elizabeth wants to hear from you”.
