Find Out Who Pays for Political Ads in Your Area (and How Much) With This Tool
If you watch TV, chances are you also watch your fair share of political ads. When most radio, TV, satellite and cable TV providers broadcast political ads, they are required to file a political file with the FCC. The idea behind the forms is to enable the public to track station transactions and correspondence as they relate to political advertising. However, when was the last time you watched which ad was shown on your favorite stations? Right.
Open Secrets , the website of the impartial non-profit organization Center for Responsive Politics, has a tool that makes it a bit easier to view ad data from FCC filings. At the time of this writing, the site has collected 4,995,681 entries, of which 3,210,135 were for the 2018 election cycle.
The site allows you to search these applications by candidate name, zip code, station name or keyword, as well as view on a heatmap where the highest number of applications occurs.
As with most searches, the narrower your search, the better the results. For example, searching just my zip code brings up an endless list of ads (769 of them to be exact) that were purchased for every station in my area. Not really helpful.
However, you can narrow down those searches even further, and then interesting information will start to come out.
For example, I can see the top 10 networks in my zip code where political ads have been purchased in the last 60 days, and then click one to drill down further to see what those ads were for.
One example: FM radio station KISQ has applied for 14 advertisements in the past 60 days, some of which support political candidates and others promote other proposals and measures that we will soon be voting on locally.
There is also all the documents and how much was paid for each ad. You can even take a deeper look at each ad to see exactly when it was shown, how many times it aired, and how much cost was associated with each impression.
Reaping the real benefits of this will take some effort on your part, but it can make the whole process of figuring out where this ad is streaming and at what cost much easier.