Or When Treatment is Strategic, No-Intent-to-Treat Intent-to-Treat Effects can be biased
One popular strategy for estimating the impact of televised campaign ads is by exploiting ‘accidental spillover’ (see Huber and Arceneaux 2007). The identification strategy builds on the following facts: Ads on local television can only be targeted at the DMA level. DMAs sometimes span multiple states. Where DMAs span battleground and non-battleground states, ads targeted for residents of battleground states are seen by those in non-battleground states. In short, people in non-battleground states are ‘inadvertently’ exposed to the ‘treatment’. Behavior/Attitudes etc. of the residents who were inadvertently exposed are then compared to those of other (unexposed) residents in those states. The benefit of this identification strategy is that it allows television ads to be decoupled from the ground campaign and other campaign activities, such as presidential visits (though people in the spillover region are exposed to television coverage of the visits). It also decouples ad exposure etc. from strategic targeting of the people based on characteristics of the battleground DMA etc. There is evidence that content, style, the volume, etc. of television ads is ‘context aware’ – varies depending on what ‘DMA’ they run in etc. (After accounting for cost of running ads in the DMA, some variation in volume/content etc. across DMAs within states can be explained by partisan profile of the DMA, etc.)
By decoupling strategic targeting from message volume and content, we only get an estimate of the ‘treatment’ targeted dumbly. If one wants an estimate of ‘strategic treatment’, such quasi-experimental designs relying on accidental spillover may be inappropriate. How to estimate then the impact of strategically targeted televised campaign ads: first estimate how ads are targeted depending on area and people (Political interest moderates the impact of political ads [see for e.g. Ansolabehere and Iyengar 1995]) characteristics, next estimate effect of messages using the H/A strategy, and then re-weight the effect using estimates of how the ad is targeted.
One can also try to estimate the effect of ‘strategy’ by comparing adjusted treatment effect estimates in DMAs where treatment was targeted vis-a-vis (captured by regressing out other campaign activity) and where it wasn’t.