Appeals to the Hispanic Demographic: Targeting through Facebook Autoplay Videos by the Clinton Campaign during the 2015/2016 Presidential Primaries

Abstract

By looking at the autoplay videos posted and shared on Hillary Clinton’s Facebook account during the 2015/2016 primary election season, this article offers much needed insight into the communication aspect of campaign targeting. Using data analysis extracted from the leading social media platform, the article examines what groups of Hispanic Facebook users were attracted to Clinton’s targeted autoplay videos, what elements within these videos best enticed these people into liking the videos, and if the Clinton campaign appeared to learn what types of autoplay videos were most effective over the course of the primary season.

KEYWORDS:

• autoplay videos
• communication
• data
• Facebook
• Hispanic (demographic)
• new media
• targeting

Notes

On the other hand, appeals in Spanish have been found to be more effective among newer arrivals to America, who are low-propensity voters and Hispanics whose primary language was Spanish (Abrajano and Panagopoulos 2011).

Also, known supporters are a broad and different type of demographic than the Hispanic demographic we are looking at in this research.

The closer the data are collected to the time of the primaries the better. While not perfectly in line, it more closely represents user interaction with the content during the primaries.

These were coded for the presence or absence of each variables, so areas of overlap—like a video which displayed both Clinton and Sanders in the first five seconds, for example—are not distinguished in the tables and graphs below unless explicitly stated. Instead, they are treated individually as a video that shows Clinton, and another video that shows Sanders. Overlap is only accounted for when explicitly stated, such as in Table 4, where we show that the presence of two variables—Clinton and a Hispanic person—brings in new Hispanic supporters in greater numbers than just the presence of Hillary Clinton alone.

This requires us to accept a limited definition of negative political advertising as one that contains an attack on the opponent—not entirely uncontested itself (see Geer 2006)—nonetheless, this might reasonably explain why these attacks do not effectively pull in new support.

Both videos were posted with Spanish text above the video, while the second clip was also about immigration.

However, there are two pairs of near duplicates. The difference being that each pair had one version with English subtitles and the other had Spanish subtitles.

The other candidates’ data extracted being Bernie Sanders, Jeb Bush, Ben Carson, Ted Cruz, John Kasich, Marco Rubio, and Donald Trump.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Edward Elder

Dr Edward Elder is a PhD graduate from the University of Auckland who specializes in political marketing communication. He has published a chapter in Political Marketing in the United States (Routledge 2014), an article in the Journal of Nonprofit & Public Sector Marketing and the book Marketing Leadership in Government: communicating responsiveness, leadership and credibility. He is also a member of the Academic Advisory Board for the Palgrave Studies in Political Marketing and Management Book Series (e-mail [email protected] for more details).

Justin B. Phillips

Justin B. Phillips is a PhD candidate at the University of Auckland. Hespecializes in media with a research focus on the effectiveness of negativepolitical advertising as well as political social media data (e-mail [email protected] for more details).