classify ads by whether they're persuasive, mobilization, listbuilding or fundraising

political ads can have many different purposes, including

• listbuilding: finding potential supporters and getting their contact info, so you can claim them as supporters and also so you can ask them for money
• fundraising: asking people -- probably people who you already know are your supporters or else people you think are reasonably likely to support you -- for money
• mobilization: asking people -- probably people who you already know are your supporters or else people you think are reasonably likely to support you -- to do stuff, like vote early or volunteer
• persuasion: communicating to people -- who are not your supporters but who probably aren't your opponent's supporters either -- about specifically-chosen issues/messages to persuade them to vote for you (or at least to not vote for your opponent)

(I realize this is a somewhat simplified ontology. Ideas on how to come up with -- and operationalize -- a different ontology are totally welcome.)

It'd be amazing to come up with a machine learning model that could come up with a decent guess as to which category a given political ad falls into. You might be able to figure this out just from the text of the ad. (In a perfect world, we could also extract interesting features from the ad images/video, but that's out of scope.)

I can talk endlessly about this idea. Let me know if you're interested. Reply here or email me at jeremy dot merrill at propublica dot org.