Political Advertising: Just another shell game for the suckers

Turn on the television right now. Dial up on your smartphone and start doomscrolling. It might take a few seconds, maybe even a minute or two. You'll see it.

Candidate after candidate, promising to remake a little slice of the world into a better place. Messages intertwined with personal attack after scripted attack. Bold promise after "destined to be broken" promise.

Settle in. We're only getting started.

Political advertising has already passed $6 billion for the current election cycle, according to AdImpact data reported by The Wall Street Journal.

Now that is a lot of money being spent trying to get inside your head.

Here's the part I want you to remember:

The advertisement is not the truth.

It's the candidate's version of the truth, a construct created by desperation, greed, and likely more than a few over-zealous marketing types who yearn for this every two years.

Sometimes it's accurate. Plenty of times it's incomplete. Almost always it is misleading.

And when you take the time to dig just below the surface, according to independent fact-checking, it's simply false.

It's not misinformation, disinformation, or any of the side track terms people and the media use to play nice. It's a lie, often a bunch of lies bundled together for no other reason than to convince you of an alternate version of the truth. A version meant to distract you from reality.

Let's take the current Florida governor's race as an example.

A biased political committee supporting Republican candidate Byron Donalds ran an advertisement claiming Democratic opponent David Jolly wanted to tax tips, overtime and Social Security.

Donalds and those behind him are counting on you falling for it and never seeking to find what is behind the curtain.

WESH Channel 6 in Orlando examined the claims and found the Social Security accusation false. It also found the ad misleading because Florida has no state individual income tax, meaning a Florida governor could not impose a state income tax on tips or overtime.

The independent research platform "PolitiFact" separately found another Donalds advertisement falsely portrayed Jolly as supporting gender-affirming surgeries for children by deceptively editing a clip and removing its context.

The PAC lied, pain and simple. With his name voluntarily attached, Donalds affirmed the lie and allowed it to become attached to his brand, his reputation, and his narrative.

Now let's turn to Connecticut.

Republican gubernatorial candidate Ryan Fazio ran an advertisement presented under the banner: “I'm a Democrat and I'm voting for Ryan Fazio.”

The northeastern US-based cable channel "News 12" reported that two of the four people featured were Republicans, including the chairman of a Republican town committee and a Republican candidate for the state legislature.

They lied, playing games with the facts seeking to inject dark humor into the issue. However, they are confident a good part of the audience will fall for it because, well, that's just human nature.

Different states. Different candidates. Different parties.

Same fundamental lesson: Don't outsource your brain to the advertisement.

Here's another interesting development this election season that has become part of the strategy from both sides. It's barely discernible, only revealed to those paying attention.

Most candidates, Democrat or Republican, aren't emphasizing their party identity in ads. Where for so many years you would see the candidate proudly identify as Left or Right, where the fine print at the end of the ad would reveal a political party connection, now it's crickets.

Missing.

Research has found that candidates can strategically blur party affiliation when they believe the label could hurt their appeal to certain voters. While they may try to obfuscate parties and platforms, voters may infer the party anyway from the issues, language and other cues in the advertisement. Keywords such as an overuse of "patriot" or "real American" point directly at one specific party. "Freedom" is one of my favorite castoffs because it is used so frequently without an obvious understanding of what it really means.

So when the party label isn't in your face, don't guess. Don't sit there as the proverbial mental log the candidates are counting on.

Investigate.

That's becoming more important because research shows that false political information can continue influencing people's impressions even after the original claim has been corrected. In other words, the factions are counting on you hearing the first take and leaving that as the definitive answer when, in reality, it's just the set-up.

Corrections generally improve factual accuracy, and research finds that dramatic “backfire” effects are uncommon.

Hang on. There's a catch.

You have to encounter the correction. You need to see it, hear it, and then question what you were told in the first place. Sad part is most people don't question. They'll claim they were "too busy", already know whom they're voting for and nothing will change their mind, or will just call out the corrections as, and you knew this was coming in here somewhere, "fake news".

So here's the CTN rule for election season: Don't believe the ad. Investigate the claim.

Who paid for it? What exactly is being claimed? What's the original source? What's missing?

Can you verify it independently?

It's only five questions. With the speed of internet searches and AI, exacting the facts could take maybe 5 minutes, tops.

Which is potentially the difference between making an informed decision and carrying somebody else's narrative around in your head.

Because once you repeat a false claim, you're no longer merely the audience, you're part of the distribution system. You are carrying the tainted water for someone else, just another link in the fantasy chain.

That's the personal branding issue nobody talks about. Your reputation is shaped by what you repeat, and if people learn that you routinely pass along things you haven't checked, that are false, misleading, little more than lies, eventually they stop trusting you.

That's true in politics, business, your place of work, absolutely everywhere.

The campaigns are going to keep talking, the ads will keep coming, and of course, the money is going to keep flowing.

The question is whether you're going to do the work, or be used as a gullible pawn

Read. Question. Verify. Then decide.

Because if you don't control your own information, somebody else will. And they will be very happy to write your narrative for you.

Be dangerously intelligent. Control the Narrative™.