The Cross-platform Election Advertising Transparency Initiative (CREATIVE) is a joint infrastructure project of the Wesleyan Media Project (WMP) and Privacy Tech Lab at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. This program is funded by a National Science Foundation grant to support WMP’s mission to make data accessible to anyone. CREATIVE aims to provide cross-platform integration and standardization of digital advertising data related to federal elections by accessing and computationally coding (with training and validation using human labeling) hundreds of thousands of digital election ads.
This website is a direct product of our NSF grant and serves to create open and accessible data and scripts that can be modified for use by others in similar contexts. Our raw data, hosted on Figshare, and our scripts, available on GitHub, can be downloaded and revised for your use case.
Closer Look: Challenges
The objective of the Cross-Platform Election Advertising Transparency Initiative (CREATIVE) pilot infrastructure is to provide cross-platform integration and standardization of digital advertising data related to elections (advertising that references candidates for office) that does not currently exist.