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Citigroup Inc. projects that spending on political ads on Facebook Inc. could surpass spending on Alphabet Inc.’s Google this year, reversing the historical pattern. This is no small accomplishment, considering how powerful search advertising remains, as a conduit for motivated donors and volunteers.
This reflects both Facebook’s vast reach and the tools it offers advertisers to target ever-narrower segments of its users. For campaigns striving to get supporters to the polls, as well as change minds, this ability to “micro-target” is manna from heaven. As with conventional advertising, it is now happening with unprecedented scale and precision in politics.
Even Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump, who once called data “overrated” as a political tool, appears to have seen the light. One day in August, his campaign sprayed ads at Facebook users that led to 100,000 different webpages, each micro-targeted at a different segment of voters, said Brad Parscale, Mr. Trump’s digital director and head of San Antonio-based digital advertising firm Giles-Parscale. Hillary Clinton’s campaign is using similar tactics, said a campaign official.
In an ideal world, campaigns would poll every voter in America, then craft strategies to persuade undecideds and motivate supporters to go to the polls, said Sasha Issenberg, a journalist who has written about the science of winning campaigns. Campaigns haven’t reached this point yet, but they are coming close.
Cambridge Analytica LLC, a data-science firm known for its psychological profiles of voters, is now working with Mr. Trump, after working with Sen. Ted Cruz during the primaries. Chief Data Officer Alexander Tayler says the firm has a database of 220 million U.S. adults with 4,000 to 5,000 data points on each. Cambridge Analytica can connect this database to vast quantities of other data—from voter-registration records to databases of shopping patterns and gun ownership—from consumer data brokers such as Experian PLC and Acxiom Corp.
Facebook has made similar tools accessible to anyone with a credit card. The social network’s role in influencing political attitudes has been much discussed. But Facebook’s increasingly important role as a campaign advertising medium has gotten much less attention.
“Everybody thought 2008 was the Facebook election, but I’d argue 2016 is the Facebook election,” says Zac Moffatt, former digital director for Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign and co-founder of political consultancy Targeted Victory. “Facebook’s real value is in its size and scale. … It’s that you can hit three out of four Americans on one platform.”
Several Facebook moves to help advertisers target their audience more precisely appeal particularly to political campaigns. Its “custom audiences” tool allows advertisers to reach a specified list of users, such as a group of supporters; both the Obama and Romney campaigns used custom audiences in 2012. Facebook also allows advertisers, including even local campaigns, to plug in data from data brokers, just as Cambridge Analytica and other firms do. And its “lookalike audiences” allows advertisers to reach people who are like those in a known group. Think of a Spotify service for finding potential supporters who look like known supporters.
Analysts from Borrell Associates estimate that about $1 billion will be spent on digital ads this election cycle.
That is still a fraction of the $4.4 billion Kantar’s Campaign Media and Analysis Group expects to be spent on TV, but the digital total is up more than threefold from 2012.
The spending, and candidates’ ability to target Facebook ads with different messages to different voters, worry Cathy O’Neil, author of “Weapons of Math Destruction,” a book about the dangers of ceding control to opaque algorithms.
“What’s efficient for campaigns is to decide what bit of information is given to a given voter on Facebook and Google,” said Ms. O’Neil. “But in that case what is efficient for campaigns is inefficient for democracy.”
Politicians, and their aides, are plunging ahead, however. “Conventional political wisdom has been destroyed by data science and the hard quantities of facts,” said Mr. Tayler, of Cambridge Analytica.
Microtargeting is important, according to the same Clinton campaign official, who cautions, however, that targeting can’t replace a candidate’s message and isn’t as powerful as conversations with friends and neighbors.
Mr. Issenberg, the journalist, says the value of targeting lies in making campaign spending more efficient. If Mrs. Clinton has $100 million to spend on a digital ad budget, efficient targeting could free up $10 million, and commensurate volunteer and campaign staff hours, to spend on something else. In a tight race, such small benefits could lead to a few thousand votes in key states, and could swing the election.
Source: The Wall Street Journal
