Nancy Watzman, managing director of the Political TV Ad Archive, explains how to use the archive as a resource for digging into campaign advertising. She also walks through how to look at tight races like the Ohio senate race and shows how the data behind the ads can be analyzed in Excel.

If you’re interested in a specific feature, fast forward to the following timestamps:

• Introduction to the Political TV Ad Archive (0:09)
• Zeroing in on senate races with TV ads (0:36)
• Introduction to the Market Map feature (0:54)
• Introduction to the search feature (1:50)
• Sample video results page (2:11)
• Browsing an individual ad’s information (2:37)
• Using the Data Download page (3:46)
• Viewing the ad data in Excel (5:04)
• Locating the archive ID for each ad (5:32)
• Using Pivot Tables to analyze ad information (5:51)
• Using the archive ID in the website’s search feature (7:49)
• Reporting examples (8:51)

For more skills and tools related to those highlighted in this video, check out:

• Getting started with Microsoft Excel
• An introduction to using Pivot Tables in Google Sheets
• Mapping basics with QGIS