If you’re a registered voter and surf the web, one of sites you visit has almost certainly placed a tiny piece of data on your computer flagging your political preferences. That piece of data, called a cookie, marks you as a Democrat or Republican, when you last voted, and what […] Read more »
I’m Right! (For Some Reason)
… Such attack ads work, in large part, because we don’t understand them. Statements take advantage of a fact about human psychology called the “illusion of explanatory depth,” an idea developed by the Yale psychologist Frank Keil and his students. We typically feel that we understand how complex systems work […] Read more »
Obama closing on progress or future
With the election campaign reaching the eve of the last debate, President Obama has talked extensively about his future plans in the very successful second debate, and has aired an ad narrated by Morgan Freeman, talking about progress made in the last four years and concluding, “The last thing we […] Read more »
Closing Arguments Hit Airwaves
… The Obama camp is the first out with what has the look and feel of a simple distillation of a campaign’s final pitch. The ad, called “Challenges” and set to the rumbling baritone of Morgan Freeman, attempts to boil down the Obama presidency into a highly favorable 30 seconds. […] Read more »
Yellow May Be the New Blue: What Voters Think of the ‘Big Bird’ Ad
The Obama campaign released an ad this week that used Big Bird to attack Mitt Romney. … We showed the ad to a representative sample of 600 Americans right after it hit the airwaves. … Yellow may now be the new blue. That is, the ad appears to have generated […] Read more »
Study Finds Broad Wariness Over Online Tracking
As marketers, browser makers and government regulators spar over efforts to let consumers limit custom advertising online, a new study suggests that Americans are largely unaware of what that means and have a strong aversion to being tracked online. The majority of Americans surveyed by researchers at the Berkeley Center […] Read more »