Summary
The Wesleyan Media Project (WMP) is the US academic research project that tracks political-ad spending and content across broadcast television, cable, and digital platforms — including the CREATIVE dataset of political-ad creatives. Its open datasets power computational analysis of campaign-ad strategy in US elections.
Body
WMP monitors broadcast and cable political advertising in near-real-time, capturing ad-airing data (station, market, sponsor, creative content) and turning it into a structured open dataset updated through election cycles. Researchers and journalists use the data to describe the actual ad-market behaviour of US campaigns — airing volume, sponsor concentration, issue framing, geographic distribution. [source: wesleyan-media-project]
The CREATIVE dataset extends this work to the creatives themselves: a machine-readable corpus of the actual ad scripts and visual assets, used for content analysis of issue framing, emotional appeals, persuasion strategies, and comparative cross-cycle trends. The CREATIVE data is published under open licenses usable for academic research. [source: wesleyan-media-project]
WMP’s GitHub data releases (Wesleyan-Media-Project/datasets) publish CSV exports of social-media political-ad classifications — Facebook and Google ad transparency snapshots — paired with the broadcast/cable catalogue. The combined corpus is the most-cited US source on comparative political-ad strategy. [source: wesleyan-media-project]
The project is academic-led (Wesleyan University), which gives the dataset a defensible methodology for empirical claims; the project’s partnership with AdImpact brings the broadcast-cable data pipeline to bear alongside the social-media stream. [source: wesleyan-media-project]
Use it for
Citing US political-ad volume, sponsor concentration, or creative-content trends across election cycles; benchmarking a campaign’s ad plan against historical baseline data; doing comparative content analysis of ad creatives; feeding a data-journalism piece or academic paper on contemporary US ad strategy.