OxTalks will soon move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events.' There will be a need for an OxTalks freeze. This was previously planned for Friday 14th November – a new date will be shared as soon as it is available (full details will be available on the Staff Gateway).
In the meantime, the OxTalks site will remain active and events will continue to be published.
If staff have any questions about the Oxford Events launch, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
Political science research consistently shows that political advertisements have small and uniform effects. This contrasts with claims that microtargeted campaigning can sway electoral outcomes and poses a threat to society. This paper introduces a novel experimental design simulating a targeted campaign to empirically test whether targeting political advertisements can be effective. Participants in an online survey experiment view one of five anti-Biden advertisements. Respondents assigned to control are allocated advertisements at random. This data is used to train a model predicting Biden favorability from advertisement and pre-treatment traits. Respondents in the treatment group view the advertisement that this model predicts to be the most effective. The difference between targeted and random allocation is an 8.7 percentage point increase in Biden dislike and a 7.1 percentage point decrease in intent to vote Biden among unaligned voters who had not yet cast their vote (N=586). The effect is negligible among partisan voters.
