Want to come up with a winning election ad campaign? Go with the evidence, not your gut | Torsten Bell

New research reveals different political ads work in different times and different places

There are so many elections this year but how to go about winning them? Labour has a sub-optimal, but impressively consistent strategy: waiting (usually a decade and a half in opposition).

It's paying off again with huge swings to them in last week's two byelections. But this approach requires patience and most parties around the world are less keen on waiting that long. So they spend a lot of time and money trying to win, which means election adverts. In the US, TV ads are centre stage. In the UK, those are largely banned (even GB News is meant to be providing news when Tory MPs interview each other) but online ads are big business.