When Political Ads Backfire: The Hidden Risks of ‘Meddle Advertising’ in US Elections

US political ad spending has increased exponentially heading into the 2024 presidential election, with an estimated $16 billion going toward the political ad market this year compared with just over $12 billion in 2022. This has important implications for not only advertisers and candidates but large firms that weigh in on political issues. 

Even non-presidential campaign-related ad spending has ramped up, with nearly $9 billion spent in 2022 compared with just $1.6 billion in 1998 — a 450 percent increase. This indicates that "politics have gone from being a small part of our lives to being around us all the time," says Columbia Business School Professor Mohamed Hussein. "Campaigns are becoming increasingly more sophisticated, and the margins of victory are becoming narrower. As a result, competition drives a lot of spending in the political space."

And given such competition and spending, innovative advertising strategies have followed. 

In the last midterm election cycle, Democrats spent $53 million on ads that helped far-right Republican candidates win Republican primaries. The goal was simple: If you allow a candidate perceived as extreme or weak to advance to the next stage, you can increase your chances of winning in the general election. Weak candidates can be those seen as too extreme, marred by a scandal, or unqualified for office. Since then, Republicans have also adopted this advertising strategy. 

It's an approach Hussein and his co-researchers — Stanford University Professor S. Christian Wheeler and PhD student Courtney Lee — call meddle advertising. According to Hussein, meddle ads have been used across a variety of races in 11 different states, including battleground states like Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Nevada. Together, they investigated the effectiveness of meddle ads and consumers' reactions to their use by political candidates from their own party.

On one hand, people might support the use of meddle ads given today’s rising political polarization. "Feelings of distrust and dislike toward the other party might make people accept their strategy, as long as their party wins and manages to keep the other party out of power,” Hussein explains.

At the same time, consumers can find meddle ads underhanded and risky: A campaign could use them and potentially lose to an extreme candidate. But Hussein and his team also uncovered an equally troubling risk: Meddle ads can make consumers feel that the very democratic system is unstable and could quickly unravel.

"When you think about meddling, you have an outside force coming in, changing the outcome of who won the nomination of the other party. As a result of that, people might start losing faith in election results,” Hussein says. “They might start wondering, ‘Hold on a second. I don't know if I can believe this anymore. Are these results accurate? Do they reflect the will of the people? Can I trust this system moving forward?’"

Hussein and his co-researchers conducted seven consumer behavior studies involving 7,000 participants and found that when people discovered that a political candidate from their party had used meddle ads, they tended to dislike that candidate. They were also less likely to donate to that candidate, more likely to speak about that candidate negatively, and less likely to vote for them.

This backlash effect is driven by a variety of factors, according to Hussein, including concerns about a candidate’s character, concerns about a candidate losing the election, and loss of faith in democracy. "If you start thinking that the moral character of the candidate is poor, you're less likely to support them," he says.

While not the central focus of the research, another finding was that, in hypothetical elections, Americans were less likely to vote in races that used meddle ads compared with races that didn't. The researchers’ preliminary findings suggest that people who find out meddle ads have been used to influence a political race are far less likely to engage in a democratic system.

While nothing limits the use of meddle ads abroad, Hussein believes the level of ad spending in the United States makes it ripe for these sorts of innovative yet sometimes problematic advertising strategies. With so many US firms weighing in on political issues and, in some cases, supporting candidates, it's important they understand the potential negative implications that come from interfacing with politics in any way, according to Hussein. 

At the same time, Hussein suggests campaigns can be shielded from meddle ad-related backlash by outsourcing such ads to outside organizations. He also advises firms to be cognizant of risks to systems, noting consumers are not only able to perceive them but are also sensitive to them: "If you are a company that is working on a product or a service or in a space that is experiencing or is about to experience a bunch of system-related risks, you need to be attuned to that and be proactive about trying to mitigate consumers’ perceptions of those risks so that you don't accidentally turn them off." 

At an event hosted by Professors Todd Jick and Bruce Usher, CBS students, staff, and faculty gathered to discuss how business leaders can better understand and address rising polarization in America: