Facebook Political Ads: Who Can Candidates Sway?
In class, we talked about the methods that are used to deliver advertisements on the web. Whereas the conventional route of simply delivering banner ads to all of the visitors to a site, targeted ads that are optimized to get more clicks have been shown to have the best payoff for both advertisers and the advertising hosts. With over a billion active users, Facebook has posited itself as one of the largest hosts on the web – the sheer amount of traffic that the website experiences generates a tremendous amount of revenue each day for Facebook and the advertisers whose ads are clicked on.
With the Democratic Presidential Primaries coming up soon, candidates are now looking to utilize that space in order to gain potential votes and followers on their platforms. They’re able to target specific demographics where they think that their message will get through to potential constituents. However, each candidate has a different campaign strategy, leading to a wide variety of target demographics with each strategy. This has been such a critical part of campaigning, that $32 million has been spent on Facebook ads alone – more than television ads.
While most of the candidates have been targeting older demographics, which tend to have higher voter turnout during the primaries, Andrew Yang and Bernie Sanders have been mainly targeting the sub-35 audience; an expected outcome, given their highly progressive platforms. On the other hand, Joe Biden and Amy Klobuchar have been targeting older women, who tend to lean more on the moderate side.
A general trend that some analysts have seen is that the ads target demographics that look like what the candidate’s supporters already consist of – an expected dominant strategy, as it becomes difficult to try to sway multiple different demographics. Furthermore, a sub-strategy for many of these candidates is to target women heavily, as they tend to have lower turnout each election.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/14/us/politics/democrats-political-facebook-ads.html