GIS Dev Cafe

In yesterdays post I focused on digital map offerings that highlighted campaign financing. While that post provides maps that answer the question of how they got their money and where it was raised, today’s posting will focus on where that money is being spent through advertising spending. These maps follow closely to the recognized battle ground states, providing an interesting look at where the parties feel their message will have the greatest impact. This will look at two sites: CNN Ad Spending and The New York Times Ad Wars Maps.

CNN Ad Spending Map

Once again, CNN provides another resource in this election campaign through their online Advertising Spending map on their election tracker website. The basic layout is a big coropleth styled map. To the side of the map is a breakdown of the amount of money spent on advertising by each campaign as well as additional party and interest group advertisement spending and number of airings for the advertisements. At the top of the map there is a drop down the controls the map data and allows the user to choose a candidate or group that is spending advertisements. Of course you could always choose all candidates to see the total amount of money spent by both parties. Similar to yesterdays finance map there is a slider at the bottom that adds temporal comparison. Below the map is a mixed offering of different campaign advertisements and related news stories.

Hovering over a state on the map results in a dialog to popup indicating the leading advertising spender for that state and the total spent, providing you are on the “all candidate” ad spending selection. If you have a particular candidate chosen it will provide a dollar amount spent. The map locations are also clickable and will take you to a breakdown of spending and airings for each candidate and other interest groups that had spending in that state.

New York Times Ad Wars Map

This map site contains a split representation of the two candidates with two separate maps and split content. The Top portion of the site lists the total dollar amount in the party colors spent as well as recent ads aligned to the candidate’s side of the website. The map content is divided the same way and displays two smaller graduated circle maps. Unlike the CNN map mentioned above the focus is on the city level and not the state level. Rolling over a circle gives the total dollar amount spent and the particular focus area of the advertisement. At the bottom of the page is a summary of issues that are mentioned in each advertisement offering.

While the CNN map allowed the user to select one group or candidate at a time to be displayed on the map, the New York Times map contains two dropdowns, one for each map/content panel. This allows for differential ad spending comparisons. As an example, let’s say we wanted to compare the Republican National Convention’s spending to the Democratic National Convention’s spending; we just have to select each one in one of the two different drop down controls.

Conclusion And Comparison

While both maps provide nice visualizations depicting the advertising spending for this election I feel the New York Times Ad Spending map is much better for comparative analysis and layout. While the maps are smaller, the size works with the graduated symbol approach and allows for a large variety of complex comparisons. For instance, news stories have recently talked about the RNC advertisement increase to assist McCain’s financial shortcomings, the NYT map allows the user to put the RNC vs. the DNC to draw comparisons to see this data, or you could put McCain on one side and the RNC on the other to compare total spending for both and get an overall strategic picture of the spending.

I also like the layout on the NYT map, as it separates the advertising so it is directly related to the data on the map. With the CNN map all the advertisements are thrown into a common pool and looking at one candidate’s ads versus the other takes some sifting. As well the big dollar totals clearly displayed at the top easily lets the viewer know how much money is being spent.

The CNN map has some advantages as well. The map is larger and easier to read. As well the historical slider does allow a person to see the spending over time. Also the drill down to spending on the state level is a nice comparison feature.

As I stated above, I feel the New York Times offering here is the better of the two websites in layout and design and is very easy to navigate and discern information about the advertisements and spending trends during this election. The CNN Ad offering can be found here. As I have said in previous postings please feel free to leave me your thoughts or interpretations in the comments, and please check back as I will be adding additional content to this series soon.