Identify missing advertisements in the Kanter presidential ads collection

Determine which US presidential campaign television advertisements are missing from the Julian P. Kanter Political Commercial Archive’s presidential ads dataset covering elections from 1952 to 2012, so that researchers can assess the collection’s completeness for historical and empirical analysis.

Background

The paper releases 9,707 US presidential campaign TV ads from the Julian P. Kanter Political Commercial Archive spanning 1952–2012, along with transcripts and AI-generated summaries. While the collection is the most comprehensive available over this long timeframe, the authors note it is not complete and that the precise set of missing ads is unknown.

This uncertainty affects efforts to analyze longitudinal trends and representativeness across decades of presidential advertising, making it important to identify which ads are absent for robust historical and empirical research.