isDo not expect to see Cambridge Analytica-style micro-targeting of political ads using personal data in this general election – this tactic is now considered by many to be an ineffective “red herring” and is increasingly being blocked by social media platforms.
Digital strategist Tom Edmonds said Facebook has banned political campaigns from using many of the tactics used in past elections. “Running a campaign to 500 people doesn’t get you much revenue, it just gets you a ton of harassment,” he said.
Edmonds, who ran the Conservative party’s digital campaigns in the 2010s, said the upcoming election would be characterised by tens of millions of dollars in online advertising from each party to reach as many people as possible. “It’s getting to the stage where it’s like TV advertising – it’s top-level messaging.”
Microtargeting is based on the idea that the more relevant an ad is to an individual’s interests and political views, the more effective it will be. In theory, a political party could use Facebook user data to send one ad to a Liberal Democrat-voting dog owner who dislikes cycle lanes and is concerned about rubbish collection, while showing an entirely different ad to a Conservative-leaning neighbour of the same age and sex who is primarily concerned about the NHS and the state of immigration.
This tactic received particular attention after the victory of Donald Trump and the Brexit campaign in 2016, and especially after The Guardian and Observer reported on the now-defunct Cambridge Analytica. The political consultancy made sweeping claims about the power to sway election outcomes and change people’s minds through targeted political campaigns, often aided by data it improperly harvested from Facebook users.
Sam Jeffers of Who Targets Me, who has been tracking online advertising in the UK for the past decade, says a lot has changed since then. He says Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, no longer allows UK political parties to target ads to specific constituencies. “Labour just picks a bunch of places in the country and says, ‘show this to everyone.’ The Conservatives don’t even do any geographic targeting on Facebook right now,” he said.
Academics have cast doubt on the effectiveness of traditional approaches to targeting ultra-niche audiences. Ben Tapin, a researcher at Royal Holloway, University of London, said his research has found “conflicting evidence to support the claim that microtargeting changes voters’ minds.” As a result, he said, microtargeting “can be somewhat misleading.”
The shift in approach to political advertising in the UK – from ultra-niche targeting to flooding the internet with the same message – has been spurred by a little-noticed change in law: Last year, the Conservatives doubled the amount of money that parties could spend during a general election campaign to £34 million, allowing the best-funded parties to be less fussy about how they spent the money.
Most of this increase is expected to go towards an unprecedented splurge on online advertising, with Labour and the Conservative parties each set to spend tens of millions of pounds on online advertising over the next five weeks. According to analysis by Who Targets Me, Labour is already spending more than £100,000 per day on Facebook and Instagram ads, with even more money being spent on buying ads around Google search results. Smaller parties such as the Liberal Democrats, Green Party and Scottish National Party are dwarfed, spending only a few thousand pounds on their election campaigns.
Tapin said online ads targeted at supporters of a particular party may be more effective, but he and his colleagues found that microtargeting political messages based on multiple demographic factors, including age, gender, education, ideology and morality, has limited effectiveness.
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Instead, he suggested, a more effective approach for political parties might be to test hundreds of different ads and then pour big money into the ones that resonate with large numbers of voters.
Tapin acknowledged that there are real concerns among the public about microtargeting, especially given that Cambridge Analytica collects social media data without “any individual’s knowledge or consent,” but these concerns may lead people to overestimate its actual power to sway elections.
“I think the jury is still out on whether campaigns can leverage detailed information about individuals to deliver hyper-personalized ads and persuade them more effectively,” he said. “I’m sure some campaigns are trying to do this, but my view is that there’s no clear evidence as to whether it’s actually an approach that works.”
