Measuring Exposure to Campaign Advertising

One reason scholarly debates over the effects of campaign advertising still continue is that good measures of advertising exposure have been unavailable. In this paper, we review six approaches to the measurement of campaign advertising, discussing the strengths and weaknesses of each in turn. We then highlight the use of advertising tracking data for measuring the campaign information environment, a technique that has many of the advantages of traditional approaches without many of the disadvantages. We offer assessments of the approach’s validity and reliability before showing how it can be used in combination with survey data to make claims about advertising’s influence on voter behavior.