While it contains a lot of things that are good for democracy, it was absent of anything much that would improve the state of online campaigning, which has exploded over the last twenty years without commensurate regulation or safeguards.

The Bill also seemed designed to be unamendable in that respect. There just weren’t any hooks to hang relevant changes on. It was largely a Bill about the franchise, not about election campaigns.

But this seems to be changing.

Enter Rycroft

Last week, the Rycroft Review into foreign influence in UK elections was published. Immediately the Government committed to:

• A £100,000 annual political donation cap for UK citizens living abroad

• A moratorium on cryptocurrency donations to parties and candidates.

The Review also commented on two areas where digital influence plays a role in UK elections.

The first is illicit foreign influence, with the recommendation that the Government needs more senior oversight, coordination and resources to deal with it.

The second is political advertising, where the Review recommended:

• A full ban on foreign political advertising

• Adding information about who paid for an ad (not just who “promoted it”)

• Bringing influencers inside the definition of paid political advertising

Lastly, even though Rycroft said it was outside the scope of his work:

“I have heard enough evidence to suggest that there would be considerable benefit to transparency of online advertising if the government were to use its convening power to work with social media companies to extend the practice and to achieve consistency in how advert libraries are presented.”

A legislative opening?

Some MPs are now pushing for ad libraries to become law.

Emily Darlington (Lab) has proposed an amendment to the RoPB to create a “Repository of Online Political Advertising” with clear standards set out in law, to be determined by collaboration between the Electoral Commission, Information Commissioner and Ofcom (and whoever they consult).

We agree with this, and the general direction of Rycroft’s recommendation. However, his argument that “the government should use its convening power to work with social media companies to extend the practice and to achieve consistency in how advert libraries are presented” does worry us.

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Platforms won’t do this alone

Ad libraries have, so far, been a private effort by social media companies to meet the PR disaster that flowed from the Russian influence and Cambridge Analytica scandals of 2016-2018. Currently, Meta’s is quite good (lots of ads, searchable, data on spending, targeting and messaging). Google’s is quite bad (fewer ads and actors, not very searchable, no useful API). Snap offers a minimal spreadsheet dump. TikTok saw the pummelling Meta and others took over political ads and decided not to accept them at all. Other services offering digital ads usually have no transparency at all.

Despite years of discussion, and direct attempts by us and others to start a conversation about common standards, the platforms haven’t done so. So, in our view, “convening” won’t help - it needs some legislative force behind it (which the Darlington amendment would supply).

The risk of getting regulation wrong

Any regulation of online political advertising needs to be put together quite delicately. In several cases where it has been brought in around the world, the platforms withdrew their services, citing “regulatory uncertainty” and “being forced to offer two-tier services”. For example, Google left the Canadian political ad market in 2018 and Brazil’s in 2024. In the EU, both Meta and Google left last year.

As much as many people don’t like political ads, on social media, they are better than no ads at all. ​​A world with no paid political ads isn’t neutral. It’s one where party and candidate visibility is determined by (increasingly biased, political) platform dynamics.

So let’s get it right

We recommend the UK builds regulation on six principles:

1. Verification
   Political ads should be traceable to accountable, UK-based actors.

2. Common data standards
   Covering content, spending and targeting to allow for cross-platform and cross-election comparison.

3. Timely disclosure
   Data on ads should be available within 24-72hrs

4. Accessible data
   Open access for researchers, journalists and civil society

5. API-first approach
   Require structured data access, rather than expensive and inconsistent user interfaces

6. Proportionate enforcement
   A single regulator, with realistic penalties aligned to market size offering plenty of opportunity to comply before enforcement takes place.

The coming months will decide whether the UK can move toward a statutory, standardised transparency regime or continues to rely on fragmented, platform-led approaches.

Regulation isn’t without risk - if the Government goes for too much, the platforms will likely walk away. But if the UK can thread the needle of effective regulation and standards-making, it could set a precedent for new global norms for how political campaigns are conducted.

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Other updates from Who Targets Me

• We’re working with Full Fact on tracking misleading claims made in political ads in the run up to the local, Scottish and Welsh elections next month.

• Trends now offers specific dashboards for Scotland, Wales and England, to help with tracking activity across those campaigns.

• You can also now access data for individual advertisers on Meta (you’ll need a supporter or journalist account for access)

• We’ve been working with election observation missions in a number of countries over the last several months (Bangladesh, Colombia and Peru to name a few). EOMs are a vital part of helping countries run better elections and protect their democracies. We’re proud to support them.

Support us

If you think political ads should be held transparent and accountable, please support our mission to make that true EVERYWHERE, ALL THE TIME.

The best and easiest way to do that is to sign up for a Supporter account on Trends. It’s £10/month.

This will help us continue building Who Targets Me Trends, the largest and most useful online political advertising analysis tool in the world.

Become a Supporter

Thanks for reading!

Team Who Targets Me

We’ve had a busy few months working on new tools, developing policy ideas and… a book (well, contributing to one). Here’s some of what we’ve been up to:

Trends: Redesigned and relaunched

Trends is our service that automatically tracks political ad spending on the major digital platforms around the world. Every day, we monitor the activity of more than 120,000 advertisers in more than 60 countries, updating the data as new ads appear and campaigns evolve.

We’ve recently relaunched the service with a new design and features. Trends now requires a free account, and for those who want to support our work, there are some paid subscription options for individual supporters and journalists.

If political advertising is something you work on, or something you want to understand better, check out the new version of Trends and create an account:

Sign up for Trends

The forthcoming UK Elections Bill

The UK’s current election rules struggle to keep up with opaque money, global digital reach and outdated regulation.

The forthcoming elections bill wasn’t intended to be a big deal (the Labour Party manifesto pitched it as tidying up a few rules around the edges), but it doesn’t have to be that way.

We put together 20 policy ideas that could strengthen the Bill, reshape electoral rules and restore public trust in elections.

You can read them here:
https://whotargets.me/en/restoring-the-integrity-of-uk-election-campaigns/

[As this newsletter went to press, the UK government announced an inquiry into foreign influence in British politics. This is welcome, but we can’t just try to stop bad things. We also need to expand good ones, such as transparency and ensuring a level playing field]

Changes to the Who Targets Me browser extension in the EU

Following Meta and Google’s withdrawal from the EU political ad market in October, we’ve chosen to pause ad data collection via the Who Targets Me browser extension in the EU.

We hope this is temporary, and that the platforms reconsider this decision (which we believe unbalances political campaigning in favour of more extreme parties and candidates) and decide to provide a legally compliant political advertising service in the EU. Alternatively, the EU could look at amending the regulation the platforms blame for their decision (we understand there is a window to do this next year).

If you’re in the EU, you can still install the Who Targets Me extension, but it won’t collect any data or produce any results unless the platforms restore political advertising services.

Of course, if you’re outside the EU, feel free to get involved.

Observing elections

Over the past year we’ve contributed to a number of election observation missions in countries including the Philippines, Bolivia, Guyana and Honduras. Trends has all the data we compiled for these missions.

For a long time we’ve argued it’s important to cover elections as if digital campaigning is normal, rather than something to talk about when problems occur. That lack of normalisation has led to a lot of hyperbole, bad assumptions and poor policy.

In short, it’s also absolutely fine to carefully describe what happened.

To that end, we co-wrote the chapter on the digital campaign in The General Election of 2024, the canonical academic study of the campaign, published after every election since 1945. It’s the first time the book has included a standalone chapter on the digital campaign, so we’re grateful for the opportunity to add something new. We hope someone (maybe even us) will do the same again in 2029, 2034, 2039 and beyond.

You can order your copy here.

Looking ahead to elections in 2026

We’re planning to work on (as usual) a whole host of elections next year, including (but not necessarily limited to) the UK’s national parliament and local elections, the US midterms, Brazil, several Indian state elections, a Canadian province, Israel, Peru and New Zealand. We’re also going to be looking at the effectiveness of the platform bans on political ads in the EU. If you’re working on, or are interested in, any of these, do get in touch.

That’ll do for 2025. Have a very Happy Christmas and New Year! See you next year.

Who Targets Me

The post below is quite long, but we’ve tried to be as comprehensive as possible in our analysis of the wide-ranging impacts of Meta’s decision to join others in banning political, social and issue ads in the EU, as a response to forthcoming regulation.

The summary is:

1. Banning political ads favours those whose speech is already highly amplified by social media algorithms as well as bad actors.

2. There will be considerable secondary effects on charities and government communications.

3. It’s not possible to fully ban political ads, and no one has successfully done so.

4. There’s a certain hypocrisy to US companies “censoring” the speech of Europeans, as their own government rails against the EU “harming” the free speech of Americans.

5. Fixing the mess will require the EU finding a way to prevent platforms discriminating against political advertising in their commercial practices, likely by weakening existing legislation and changing the mechanism by which it is enforced.

6. If this happens, the benefits will be significant. It will create a fairer, more competitive political advertising market, wider reach for legitimate political speech, more transparency and accountability, and lower compliance costs for platforms.

What happened?

Last Friday, Meta announced it would ban “Political, Social and Issue” ads in the EU, starting in October. This has likely been coming for a while, but is a huge decision and will have a large effect on the way European politics is done online. Meta cited the forthcoming implementation of the EU’s Transparency and Targeting of Political Advertising (TTPA) regulation, focusing specifically on the targeting provisions of the new law and the perceived effects on their products.

Some will rejoice. Political ads can be annoying, particularly if a politician you don’t like is repeatedly thrust into your social media feeds. After the Trump and Brexit referendum of 2016, people incorrectly ascribed Facebook ads with magical powers of persuasiveness. Surely stopping them will also stop bad things happening again?

Unfortunately, that’s wrong. There are no winners here - not Meta, not the EU, not parties, campaigns or charities, not voters, not advocacy and research organisations like ourselves, not democracy. Below, we set out what it means, how we got here and what needs to happen next.

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What does an ad ban mean for political speech?

The primary result of Meta’s ban is that online political speech in the EU will become even more algorithmically mediated. Political actors will have significantly less control over whether anyone sees their material than they do now.

For some, who built their politics and careers around online attention and engagement, the ban will further extend their advantage. By contrast, the relative losers will be more “normal” politicians, who prefer to talk about policy or don’t have any particular social media magnetism, as they can no longer pay for speech and reach on the largest platforms. As a consequence, we’ll see many more politicians flailing around, trying to generate engagement, “go viral”, pay “creators” or hire networks of accounts off-book to try and earn them their own tiny drop of attention.

Following from this, political speech in Europe will continue to get more extreme, as politicians search for whatever juice the algorithms can give them. “Reasonable” online politics will be harder to find. Not everyone can be a Zohran Mamdani (a charismatic, young, video-first politician running in a world-famous city with a giant media focus on him during an off-cycle primary election when not much else was going on). By contrast, a candidate for local elections in (say) Poland or Spain, competing with thousands of other candidates nationwide, only needs a few hundred zlotys/euros worth of ads to reach their specific pool of voters (rather than a full-time videographer, designer, copywriter and stylist, let alone actual charisma, good looks, unique policy positions etc).

A further disadvantage, that all politicians will face, is that it will be more difficult, perhaps impossible, for them to reach their voters. Paid online advertising allows them to show ads to people of voting age, in quite tightly defined geographical areas, often with specific interests or characteristics. Social media algorithms don’t work like that, creating a jumble of content ranked on the basis of predictions about what a user might be interested in or engage with, with the goal of keeping them on the platform to see (ironically) more advertising. An organic social media post by a local politician in Paris is of little use to a voter in Perpignan. The ability of a campaign to be intentional and efficient about who it reaches (or doesn’t reach) is therefore greatly reduced when it can’t buy ads. Millions of Europeans will now see “Vote for me today!” messages from politicians they couldn’t vote for a week after their election has happened, because the platform algorithm decided it was a good time to show them the post. This is bad for campaigns, voters, democracy and for Meta too, because their services will show less relevant political content.

Another set of losers from Meta’s ban, and hugely important, are European charities, who spend millions a year on ads to find new donors and supporters. People are starving in Gaza, yet Meta will cut off Medicins Sans Frontieres, UNICEF, the Red Cross and many others from fundraising for their work there in less than two months. Money for vital causes will be lost, with serious consequences. For this reason alone, Meta’s decision is immoral. Charities have until October to find the same money elsewhere. This will be impossible.

Government communications in the EU will also be affected. Many national and local governments, and their agencies, use Meta ads to promote things as various as the opening of a new park, to media literacy, to the rollout of social programmes and public health initiatives. Ads let them target the specific groups of citizens who will benefit from these. Soon, no more. “Make videos the algorithms will like” isn’t a realistic replacement for this for slow, often necessarily conservative government communications. Or do you think your government should post like the White House does?

The final group to mention is the ecosystem of thousands of staff, agencies and consultants who work in political and charitable advertising in the EU, who spend their time trying to get the message of their party or client out. The social media platforms are so large, and the skills and knowledge used to work within their services so specific and detailed, that they are economies in themselves. Many have built businesses (or parts of their businesses) around running online political advertising, of which Meta was the largest portion. They will need new jobs.

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Why bans don’t work (and hurt even more people in the process)

One of the problems with Meta’s decision to ban ads is that the definition of “political” is hard to pin down. The company’s original decision, in 2018, to create a broad definition including “social and issue advertising” in their political ad programme was designed to help with this lack of precision. By casting a wider net, Meta was more likely to verify and make transparent a wider range of advertisers seeking to influence elections and policy.

However, as a direct result of this original ambition, their ban will now affect a much larger number of actors. In October, the majority of political advertising will disappear from Meta’s services, because it’s easy to identify ads from mainstream political parties and candidates. The company already has a large list of political and issue advertisers who have gone through their verification process to use for this.

But political, social and issue ads will continue to run around the edges, as new accounts pop up and run them accidentally (or on purpose), albeit now without the transparency, verification, moderation and oversight of a well-managed political advertising service.

The ban will therefore make it harder to detect bad actors who don’t follow the rules, and will ensure such accounts have a significantly higher share of voice than they do today. For example, ads from foreign influence campaigns, though likely still rare and low-reach, will now be “louder” than those of the CDU in Germany, Fratelli d’Italia, VVD, PSOE or any other European political party.

Worse, because of blurry definitions and inconsistencies in the way Meta’s systems work, their advertising systems create thousands of false positives each year - ads and advertisers that are not political, but which are identified to be. Things as prosaic as companies installing solar panels, or musicians and authors who, because they advertise under their own names often “look” like politicians, will be denied advertising. Their speech, marketing and potentially entire business will be accidentally caught - and destroyed - in the crossfire.

Our point is this - it isn’t possible to reliably ban political ads on large social media services that accept self-service advertising. There are too many ads and advertisers, too many bad actors and far too many shades of grey. Meta, like TikTok and Google before them, are choosing to fall into this trap. When it is inevitably proven that political ads are still running on their services, there could be investigations, legal cases and fines. After all, the TTPA will still apply to them, with all its attendant penalties. What mitigation will they now be able to plead when there are no good political ads, only bad ones?

Why are Meta doing this?

Let’s now turn to the regulatory “uncertainty” that led Meta to this decision.

When the TTPA was passed, alongside an attempt to define a political ad and transparency provisions, it included a ban on the “profiling” of the targets of political ads using special category data (as defined by the GDPR). Like a food label which tells us a product “may contain traces of nuts”, Meta’s is saying it can’t guarantee special category data isn’t included in the targeting mixture for any form of advertising. Because it can’t disentangle, let alone make transparent, such data in targeting, a ban is the only way forward.

We think the legislation over-stretched. What should have been a regulation to set common transparency standards and advertiser verification processes (both of which Meta are broadly fine on), helping organisations like ourselves, as well as journalists, researchers and other political parties hold campaigns to account, instead now includes provisions that made it harder to convince the largest tech platforms it was in their interest to comply. Limiting targeting methods in the TTPA made the definition of “political” vastly more important because it meant Meta had to offer different services for different types of ads. To do this, a service needs a way to draw a clean, straight line between them but, as explained above, this simply doesn’t exist.

That said, Meta has been slippery and cowardly. Nick Clegg, when he was still at the company, argued Meta wanted and welcomed the clarity regulation would bring. Well, the TTPA is the EU’s regulation for political ads, and they clearly don’t welcome it. Added to this, while Google made their equivalent announcement last year, Meta waited until late on a Friday afternoon when Brussels is largely on holiday, 75 days before the regulation was due to go into full effect. They waited and waited, and let things drift on. It’s true that the EU Commission has taken a very long time to provide the details and specifications needed to complete the TTPA. Too much has been left to secondary legislation and even now Brussels hasn’t finished all the details. But as far as we know, Meta hasn’t raised this as an issue. There was no “final straw”. The waiting seems to have been a tactical ploy in the grand game of the EU vs the US (Meta also recently declined to sign up to a voluntary code of conduct on AI).

The unintended consequence of the TTPA is not that it weakens Meta (or Google) by forcing them to ban political ads (as they say again and again, there’s not much money in it for them, it’s no great material loss), but the regulation will (unintentionally) weaken European democracy. It was well-meaning, but in its current form, by including limits on ad targeting, it’s proved to be an own goal.

Two notes on the wider context

It’s worth noting at this point that TTPA enforcement will be quite different to that of the DSA, with more emphasis on the role of the EU states and by different entities (e.g. electoral management bodies rather than media regulators). Given contemporary geopolitics, where the US treats EU regulation of “their” tech platforms as a bargaining chip in a wider trade war, we think it’s currently extremely unlikely that a EU member state would take action against a platform for failing to meet their obligations under the TTPA. Perhaps Meta (and Google’s) lawyers perceive a technical risk, but it’s certainly not a practical one at this stage. The idea that a US platform would be forced to pay a giant fine for failings in political ad transparency systems is for the birds. Furthermore, the TTPA also contains a review clause, which could be used to amend it (we think) as soon as 2026 (the law was passed in March 2024 and the review is “within two years”). Being cynical, we’d expect no cases to be brought in that timeframe, and for the platforms to start dictating the terms of a revised regulation or for it to be scrapped entirely.

The second note is an irony. Representative Jim Jordan’s Judiciary Committee of the US House of Representatives describes the DSA as “the EU’s comprehensive censorship law”. And yet here are giant American platforms denying Europeans the promotion of perfectly legitimate political speech that might reach hundreds of millions of citizens. The impact of this is far broader than any “European DSA rules allowed some tweets by my ideological friends to be taken down” complaint. A further irony is that a large amount of American speech (aka money that supports European campaigns of all stripes) will also be curtailed as a result of these bans. Is anyone going to support their free speech rights?

American platforms will censor European political speech from the centre, left and right (including many of Jordan’s ideological fellow travellers) more directly and at a larger scale than anything the EU has ever imagined. Yet we don’t expect any outcry from Washington.

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Will anyone actually benefit from ads disappearing?

Hungary’s next parliamentary elections are in April 2026. For years, Viktor Orban and Fidesz have dominated the Hungarian media landscape, including of paid political advertising. When we speak to Hungarian civil society and opposition, they sometimes argue that a ban would help their cause, as it negates one of the many advantages Orban holds. But, unfortunately, an oligarchic semi-democracy is an oligarchic semi-democracy. Algorithms which already favour extreme content will noisily promote Orban’s anti-immigration, conservative message, and will be supported by an opaque army of paid influencers and media outlets. What happened in Romania last year may happen again in Hungary, though this time there will be no constitutional court to annul the result, and the opposition will be less able to use paid speech to counter it.

Others argue that voters will benefit, because political ads are invasive and annoying. They also sometimes contain mis- or disinformation or misuse personal data (though the vast majority don’t). It’s our view that a mixture of user controls (most platforms allow you to block advertisers or categories of advertising) and transparency is a much better solution. We know that’s not perfect, nor will it ever be, but in our view it’s the best balance between the necessary trade-offs.

This leaves one final set of beneficiaries - the bad actors described throughout this piece, who already enjoy algorithmic amplification, who are happy to skirt electoral rules and who challenge the very existence of democracy. If the only people to truly benefit from this are the ones we’d all least like to, we’re in a very bad place.

The fix: All platforms need to take political ads seriously

Fortunately, the policy solution is simple (though the politics will be complicated).

The EU needs to find a way to prevent platform discrimination against political advertising. If a very large platform accepts ads (they all do), they really should accept political (and social and issue) ads. There’s no obvious legal mechanism to make this happen, but one way would be to say “if you ‘ban’ political ads, and we find any, the penalties could be large. But if you allow them, and follow the law, we will be understanding of the many difficulties of doing this at scale.” In other words, we’ll tolerate a proportion of false negatives and positives provided you ensure most ads are verified and transparent.

The TTPA’s clause forcing a review of the legislation in 2026 is an opportunity in that respect. This could start soon, with a view to finding the right balance of carrot and stick. Done right, it could reduce the large platforms desire to duck the TTPA, making it less likely the would continue to slice off political advertising portion and sacrifice it to regulatory “complexity”.

This would be good in several ways. One is a very “why the European Union exists” benefit. More participants in the market, operating under common rules and standards, is why the EU exists. It would lead to a wider choice of services for political advertisers (Meta, Google/YouTube, TikTok, X, LinkedIn), the ability to reach a broader range of audiences (especially younger voters), as well as more innovation and product development in the market. Costs for campaigns would likely fall. Users would be safer.

The market would also be fairer for the platforms. Meta being the last major player standing in the EU meant it faced all of the regulatory scrutiny and cost alone. With more players in the market, that cost is spread and lessons can be learned and shared as new challenges and services emerge.

Lastly, democracy would benefit. A transparent political advertising market is what we’ve consistently called for since we started this work the best part of a decade ago. There should be common definitions for “political and issue advertising”, reliable advertiser verification and good quality ad libraries. There should be an understanding that there will always be false positives and negatives and that only egregious errors or flagrant disregard for the rules need to be punished. From this, there should be a thriving ecosystem of organisations holding political advertising to account, rather than having to spend time and money hunting for it in the darker corners of the internet.

Political advertising is unloved, but Churchill’s famous line that “democracy is the worst form of government, apart from all the others” applies here too. An internet without political ads, where algorithms are the primary deciders of what voters do and don’t see, where there’s little transparency, and where the good guys who follow rules are punished while the bad guys who don’t, is worse than an internet with them.

The EU needs to work, quickly, with the platforms and other stakeholders to find a way forward.

After a post-UK election hiatus, we’re back with a US-focused edition of Full Disclosure.

Below, we run through all of the Who Targets Me tools that shed light on how the campaigns are using digital ads in the race for the White House. We’ve picked out some highlights of what we’re seeing across digital ad spending, targeting and messaging with a month to go.

Remember - these are tools you can explore for for yourself, so please go ahead and have a go. We hope you find them useful.

Anyway, on with the data.

1) Kamala Harris is massively outspending Trump on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.

This is Harris versus Trump (and a little bit of Kennedy) on Meta over the last three months. Harris has bought over $80m of ads, Trump less than $10m.

Here’s the same chart, but for Google and YouTube spending:

Again, Harris is over $80m, Trump is still way behind, but here has spent over $30m.

Despite apparently being propelled to the Presidency by his social media posts, the Trump campaign seems not to like digital very much. Their relative preference for YouTube seems borne out of it being more like TV than any particular strategic benefits. Some Republican strategists are worried about this, though he is spending heavily on TV and direct mail (one estimate thinks he’s outspending Harris on that channel 10 to 1). At this point, you might argue that this Trump campaign, as opposed to the 2016 and 2020 versions, is Trump redux. He’s only doing the things he likes (grift and rallies) and outsourcing the rest to allies like Elon Musk and supportive PACs.

You can dig into all this data on our Trends dashboard for the US, where we’re tracking all of the pages associated with the presidential campaigns, as well as over 30,000 others.

2) The parties are competing to reach Latino voters

Right now, the most politically competitive interests on Facebook and Instagram are all related to Latino audiences (see the “Contested Audiences” tab). A few years ago, Meta banned the use of race as a targeting criteria for political ads. This data shows how the parties work around that. But it also shows that both parties consider Latino voters to be important this time around, with the Democrats on the defensive, fearing that Trump might further increase his vote share among this group (as he did in 2020). For decades Latino voters were reliably blue, but Trump seems to be changing that, and his party is targeting them to try and seal the deal.

It’s also quite *fun* to look at who the Democrats want to avoid showing ads to. Yes, those do seem like quite Republican things.

Lastly, note how Trump doesn’t really bother with younger voters at all on Facebook. Nearly half of his ads actively avoid reaching the under 35s.

That’s a very different profile to Harris, who mostly reaches all age groups.

We’re grateful to Dr. Fabio Votta at UvA for his work building these dashboards and aggregating the targeting data across thousands of advertisers.

3. Harris dominates the swing states on Meta

Here’s a county-by-county map of where the two presidential campaigns are geotargeting ads (by zipcode etc).

To build this, we exclude the majority of fundraising advertising (which largely uses Custom and Lookalike Audiences to target donors directly) leaving behind only the ads designed to persuade and mobilise voters in the swing states.

If a county is blue, it means Harris is outspending Trump there (darker = by more), if it’s red, Trump is in the lead and if it’s purple, it’s level or level-abouts. As you can see, there are very few red counties.

You can also see neither side has much up its sleeve. The swing states are the ones everyone knows about. No-one’s wasting any cash on Texas or Florida. You can also see that Harris is even outspending Trump in Nebraska, where a single electoral college vote is up for grabs. It’s close enough for that to matter.

The map (which is a bit slow, so be patient - there’s a lot of data going on), allows you to look at the Presidential campaign, Republicans vs. Democrats and the entire ecosystem of Meta political advertisers in the US (all 30,000+ in our system). You can also look at rolling week or month long periods to see how it changes over time. Clicking a county shows who we’ve found advertising there along with an estimate of how much they’ve spent doing so.

4) Harris moves to persuasion and mobilisation, Trump focuses on rallies and voter registration in swing states, both attack each other

After months of primarily fundraising advertising, the balance of the Harris digital ad campaign has switched to issues (tax cuts for the middle class, Trump’s position on banning abortion, support for small businesses among others) and mobilisation (asking voters in swing states to start returning their postal ballots).

On Meta, Trump is still promoting rallies (though not always his own - JD Vance appears in many of the current ads), though is also pushing last minute voter registration across several swing states, and appealing for votes. None of the ads make more than a passing mention of his policy plans.

To make it easier to see what’s happening across the thousands of ads each campaign is currently running, we’ve built an AI-powered tool that summarises the content of the promoted content from both the Trump and Harris campaigns (scroll to the bottom of each page for those).

For their YouTube ads, both campaigns go on the attack, with messages just like the ones you’d see on TV (where a lot of YouTube is actually watched). You just need to see a screenshot of one of the ads to know exactly how it plays - that deep American attack ad voiceover, the black and white bit, the brooding music.

Here’s a Trump YouTube ad, seen millions of times, accusing Harris of supporting “taxpayer funded sex changes for prisoners and illegal aliens”:

And here’s one from Harris on Trump’s “Project 2025” that would give Trump “unprecedented, unchecked power, to do whatever he wants”:

No one really likes attack ads, except political campaigns.

5) Lastly, a plug (in). The Who Targets Me browser extension now tracks ads across platforms.

After 7 years of tracking Facebook ads, we’ve expanded the functionality of our browser extension. It now tracks political ads across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X and YouTube (reminder - no paid political ads on TikTok and doing this for display advertising would be insurmountably hard, we think).

We are working with the Universities of Syracuse (NY) and Manchester (UK) to try and understand more about how people experience political ads on different platforms. If you’re in the US and want to help, please install the extension and take their survey. Give it a share too - more people install it when you do.

Install the Who Targets Me extension

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be updating the displays in the extension to display data from all of the new services we’ve added (at the moment, it’s only tracking the ads for the university study).

Thanks!

Thanks for reading. Remember, please take a look at Trends, install the Who Targets Me browser extension and, if you liked this and want to support our work and tools, please consider taking out a paid subscription or making a donation.

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All the best,

Who Targets Me

P.s. If you’re a journalist covering campaigns, political ads, tech etc and want to learn more about political ads and using the sorts of data we’re covering in this newsletter, we now offer training. Get in touch if you want to learn more.

Overall, £11.2m was spent on them by parties, candidates and other campaigners between the election being called on 22nd May and 4th July. Of that, £8.5m was spent on Meta ads (Facebook and Instagram) and £2.7m on Google (including YouTube).

We don’t yet know how much was spent on other digital ad platforms or on services such as Spotify (where Labour bought ads on polling day), so the number will go up once the final tally is in.

All that money paid for somewhere in the region of 2 billion political ads (or around 70 ads per voter).

Polling day was the highest spending day of the campaign, with over £1.1m of ads bought (remember, there’s a media blackout that day, but it doesn’t apply to campaign ads, who can do what they want, without anyone holding them to account).

In terms of the parties, Labour spent £6.1m on digital ads (£3.9m on Meta, £2.2m on Google). Half of that was spent centrally, the other half by candidates. The Tories bought £2m of Meta ads (two-thirds bought centrally) but just £115,000 of Google/YouTube ads. The Lib Dems nearly matched the Tories on Google (£113k), but spent only £336,000 on Meta (though this was very efficient - only £6,300 in digital ads per seat won, the lowest of all parties). Reform spent £750,000, double the Lib Dems, with £625k on Meta and £125k on Google for just five seats won (£150k per seat was the highest of all the parties). 80% of their spending went through Nigel Farage’s Meta page. Lastly, the Greens spent a touch under £300k on online ads as part of their campaign to win their four seats.

Was this a lot of money?

Well, as we predicted last year when the spending limits were relaxed, it certainly was the ‘most digital campaign ever’, though it wasn’t as expensive as we might have expected (largely because the Tories were clearly financially constrained). That said, 2024 continues the unbroken streak of each election having had more digital ads than the last. (Easy prediction: 2028/9 will break the record again.)

You can view all the spending data via our Trends website.

On to the 10 things we spotted:

1/ Labour’s digital campaign was well resourced and executed. Like the overall campaign, it didn’t need to take risks

Labour’s digital ad campaign:

• Had a clear message which was consistently applied. A campaign about “change” didn’t change, because nothing really came along to knock them off course. Their ads at the beginning of the campaign were basically the same as they were at the end.

• Featured relatively less attack messaging than the Tories. In paid ads, there was nothing at all about Sunak, Truss or Johnson. It wasn’t exactly policy heavy, but they did fairly consistently refer to their ‘Six First Steps’ for government.

• Spent a lot of time communicating that it was ok for former Tory voters to switch to Labour. Less time was spent getting their core vote out.

• Clearly had a financial advantage over the Tories throughout. This likely made planning activities much easier because they had to make fewer difficult choices about resources. This was not a “Mo Money Mo Problems” election campaign for Labour.

• Had space to try new things with unknown returns. They bought newspaper takeovers on the Mail, Sun, Express and Metro websites. Their Spotify ads were very prevalent on election day. Again, they had the money to do it.

• Used lots of characters. Starmer fronted the campaign, but Streeting on health, Reeves on the economy, Philippson on education and Cooper on crime all showed up regularly. Lots of candidates were also well-supported by ads. By contrast, the Tories had no real people to carry their message. For example, Rishi Sunak didn’t run an ad in his name after the first week of the campaign.

More broadly, the Labour digital campaign:

• Came from the position of being the ‘challenger’, allowing the party to be punchier and fun with organic content. This mostly showed up on Twitter/X and TikTok.

• Was well drilled, in that things like digital community organising had been happening for a long time already, and the campaign was ready to go across all channels ‘on the B of the Bang’, when Sunak called it.

• Used all means available - email, SMS, Whatsapp, web, communities, ads and more. The other campaigns were more constrained by resources.

All the above comes from experience and scale.

Labour now has a deep bench of people who have worked on digital campaigns over the past decade. This includes folks with long experience inside the party, including working on Starmer’s leadership campaign and Sadiq Khan’s mayoral elections and re-elections, the 2015 and 2017 campaign team members who returned, as well as people who have worked for the big progressive online campaign orgs. The team ended up with over 30 people on staff in HQ, plus at least the same again spread across the country helping local campaigns. Labour also pulled in agencies to add capacity where needed. This was a very well resourced campaign.

2/ The Liberal Democrats, Greens and Reform also performed well

Each of the smaller parties seemed to have sufficient resources to carry out a very functional digital campaign. All three had their targets and stuck to their list (though Reform’s was blurrier, suggesting they also wanted national vote share, even if it didn’t deliver seats). None of their target seats went short in terms of support from ads.

Reform did advertise beyond the four seats they won, into a much wider swathe of the north (in particular) in the hope of picking up more seats, or lots of second places. Ironically, the 5th seat they did win (South Basildon and East Thurrock), was one they didn’t buy any ads in, which suggests they didn’t have a totally clear picture of where exactly their support was.

Creatively, the ads were fairly predictable. Lots of “Labour can’t win here”/bar chart ads from the Lib Dems and Greens. Reform’s went with “The election is over, only Reform will stand up to Labour”. It’s interesting just how divergent this was from, for example, the Lib Dems’ media strategy. Ed Davey’s bungee jumping didn’t appear in their paid ads at all.

3/ Tory attack ads didn’t get traction

The Tory campaign was negative to start with, and got more negative over time. By the end, their “don’t give Labour a supermajority” ads, if their comments and replies were anything to go by, were prompting a “so what” or “vote Reform” response from those who saw them.

Other attempts to attack Labour, such running hundreds of localised ads claiming Keir Starmer would launch a national ULEZ immediately after being elected, or the persistent messages on tax, were also tried, chopped, changed and dropped throughout the campaign.

So did the Tory attacks fail?

If you take the lowest MRP predictions, with the Tories close to slipping into third place, then perhaps you can argue it frightened some voters back into the fold and pushed them back above a hundred seats. On the other hand, if the Tory campaign’s original ambition was to claw their way back towards a margin-of-error deficit, and start talking about a hung parliament, they never got anywhere near it.

Overall, there was no balance to the Tory campaign. They ran just seven policy ads on Meta, versus several thousand attack ads. Their digital campaign offered nothing for potential or former Tory voters to support, beyond tribal loyalty to the party (of which there turned out to be very little).

4/ The Tories didn’t have the money, and the centre didn’t work with the periphery

Labour outspent the Conservatives on ads in most seats they were trying to win. Election day was a case in point. On Meta, Labour and its candidates spent £433,000 on July 4th, the Tories just £174,000. On Google, Labour spent £225,000, the Tories just £1,300.

In fact, the Tories being outspent was true almost everywhere. By targeting relatively fewer seats, the Lib Dems, Reform and the Greens were all able to concentrate their efforts and pour significantly greater resources into the places they hoped to gain.

Worse, every Tory candidate appeared to stand alone. While Labour candidates were given training on how to run their digital campaigns, which images and assets to use, messages to stick to and the money they needed to pay for it all, every local Tory campaign appeared to be making it up as they went. The result was no consistency of strategy, message or brand.

Labour, the Lib Dems, the Greens and even Reform (who started two weeks late) showed more organisation and coordination, and the Tories were squeezed from every side. Their entire campaign machine will need to be rebuilt if they want to make progress in 2028/9.

5/ Despite Tory spending being lower than expected, record amounts were still spent on Meta and Google.

£11.2m of Meta and Google ads is significantly more than the £7.3m that was spent in 2019 (it was just £1.75m in the 2015 election). Tory spend increased from £1.9m across both platforms in 2019 to £2.1m this time. Labour’s digital ad spend nearly doubled, from £3.4m in 2019 to £6.1m this year.

So 2024 was the most digital election yet, though with the Tories failing to spend big, and the increased spending limits still in place, there’s still plenty of room for it to increase next time (and the time after that).

6/ Parties preferred Meta

The ratio of Meta to Google spending was around £3:£1 (the same as it was in 2019). This is most likely because Meta still offers more targeting options for political advertisers, allowing them to reach people they suspect to be supporters.

The Tories really preferred Meta, running many ads targeted at smaller and smaller audiences (sometimes as few as 100 people), as they tried to focus on those they hoped would switch back to them from planning to vote for Reform or the Lib Dems. This strategy wouldn’t have been possible with Google/YouTube ads, which really only allow age and postcode area targeting.

Earlier in the campaign, we said the Tory campaign didn’t make sense, because their ads were showing up in lots of constituencies where they had little chance of winning. We got some pushback about this from inside their campaign, arguing their ads were in fact “very targeted”.

Because Meta provides no context at all for Custom Audiences (we think they should require political advertisers to give them a descriptive name that informs people seeing the ads about what data they contain), they could have been doing all sorts of clever things with the data they’d collected in the run up to the election, and were focusing their ads more and more tightly on people they felt needed to be persuaded. Unfortunately, because of the lack of transparency, we’ll never really know.

7/ Converting Reform’s online popularity into seats will be hard

Nigel Farage has fans. Like Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn before him, and (to a much lesser extent), Ed Miliband or (to a much greater extent) Bernie Sanders or Barack Obama before that, he’s popular online. By comparison, Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak haven’t been able to cultivate an online fandom, at least in terms of people who will spontaneously create content, like it, share it, make positive comments and so on.

An example of this is the way Reform started running ads via the party account, only to find that running them from “Nigel Farage” was more effective. Reform’s page didn’t run many ads after that. Another example is that anything anyone else posted - as a Facebook ad, a tweet, a TikTok video - got quickly swamped with “Vote Reform” comments, which in turn were liked or upvoted to the tops of the threads. Some have argued this is bot-like behaviour, but this fairly common charge is hard to prove. The same was said about Boris Johnson fans’ comments in 2019, but no evidence later emerged that showed they weren’t real people just doing things on the internet.

The future challenge for Reform will be converting online enthusiasm into seats. This year, they piled up votes where they weren’t needed, and spent money where they couldn’t win. By 2028/9, will they have a proper campaign infrastructure to turn online fandom into votes in the right places? This will be a difficult organisational challenge.

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8/ Not a TikTok an election, nor an AI one, nor a particularly dodgy one

Despite the hype, TikTok just doesn’t reach enough voters to make a big difference. Turnout was just under 60%, and significantly lower among the younger voters most likely to use TikTok. Depending on who you read, Reform “won” TikTok (other readings are that Labour did), but it’s hard to make a case that it was very important to their ultimate result. Reform won seats in places with lots of older people. Labour didn’t do as well as it might have in places with lots of younger voters (losing vote share to the Greens and some independents seems evidence of that). There’s likely to have been no measurable TikTok effect at all, beyond the shift in tone that results from parties trying to create content that works there.

Similarly, AI never showed up in this election, either as a campaign tool or as an external threat. To us, this was always pretty obvious. The risks are too great for parties to use it, AI tools don’t work that well yet, the AI companies and social media platforms didn’t really want it to be a big thing (so put some guardrails in place) and the degree of personalisation feared by some is currently impossible to pull off. The US election, which is a much tighter contest, and where the political culture is so much more adversarial, seems to be a likelier victim of this, though it hasn’t happened yet. Perhaps it will in 2028.

Finally, another fear about modern elections is that they’re going to be swamped with domestic or foreign disinformation. In 2024, that didn’t show up either (and it didn’t really happen in the EU elections or French parliamentary election either).

In the past, we’ve written about the tendency to focus on ‘weird things’ in elections, like AI and disinformation, to the detriment of simply covering what parties and candidates do. The balance of this was better in 2024 (and we tried wherever possible to contribute to it), but those covering elections could still go further (more on our plans for that at the bottom) to avoid spreading unnecessary fear and distrust about the electoral system.

One example was Channel 4’s Dispatches programme which showed real voters faked AI videos and graphics to see if it could influence their hypothetical vote. It aired a week before the election, but should have been canned once it became obvious the effect in 2024 was going to be zero.

9/ The electoral system is creaky, and needs reform

We’ll set aside the FPTP vs. PR conversation, as it’s not really our issue, but plenty of other areas of the campaign showed areas where the electoral system could be improved.

First, national campaigns are ever more entwined with local ones. A candidate has a spending limit of around £17-20,000 for their own short campaign while a national campaign can spend what it wants in a constituency provided it stays somewhat generic in its messaging (and within their much larger national spending limit). This seems to help small to medium-sized political parties, particularly if they’re national, as they can run hundreds of candidates nationally while accumulating a healthy campaign budget they can target at a handful of key seats. Independents and small parties can’t do this because their budgets aren’t large enough, nor can the big ones, who are actively campaigning in hundreds of seats and whose budget is therefore spread more thinly (though obviously they get all the media attention).

Second, the spending limits themselves are too high. They’re unbalanced in favour of the two biggest parties. Smaller parties aren’t ever going to be able to raise £30m plus and compete on a level playing field. The current limits are still based on the cost of printed material, not the much lower cost of buying digital ads. The way campaigns spend money has changed, as has what they get for that money. The limits should be reformed to account for this.

Third, there’s still a lack of transparency standards for digital campaigning. We need clear rules that help the media to hold campaign activity accountable. People need to know who’s running messages in their seat, how many and which people are seeing it and what they say. Meta does this via their Ad Library, but is weak on transparency about the way campaigns use data (see our point about Custom Audiences above) and the geographical data they publish is very hard for anyone to understand (though we had a go). They’re also in the process of closing down CrowdTangle, and replacing it with something that many researchers are unhappy with. Google’s transparency is even weaker and much narrower. Other services (e.g. programmatic ads, Spotify) provide no transparency at all. We need fixed standards to improve on what the platforms provide. While they’re at it, the government can also digitise and make real-time other forms of campaign transparency (is it really that hard for a campaign to upload a receipt or a copy of a leaflet?)

10/ Digital ads are a very useful tool for real-time campaign tracking

Unlike physical, real-world campaigning, where you might be limited to mapping where the party leaders go or getting a small sample of the leaflets being delivered, when you get sufficient transparency from tech platforms, you can do interesting things with it.

We used transparency tools to build new spending trackers to follow all the money. We built a targeting dashboard to show how the parties were using different methods to reach voters. We built a map of where ads were showing up and who was running them. We started experimenting with AI summaries of ad campaigns, to see if that would give us an interesting overarching sense of the messages and themes being used in ads (we’ll be doing more on this). Our browser extension is still the only tool that sees the ads people actually see.

This allows for something of a real time view into where campaigns are putting their efforts, and helps voters see better what’s going on where they live. We think that’s going to be increasingly important as campaigns continue to invest more and more in campaigning via digital channels. And so we’ll invest more into making these tools better (if you have ideas for things we should be doing, please let us know).

11/ Bonus point - thank you!

There’s lots of people to thank:

• Everyone who signed up to this newsletter, particularly those who took out a paid subscription. Thanks!

• All the people who got in touch during the campaign to point us towards interesting stories.

• All the journalists and researchers who took an interest in our work and used our data and insights in their coverage of the election.

• The people who installed our browser extension and participated in our research with the University of Manchester.

• The Who Targets Me team, particularly the folks who jumped on board at the start of the campaign to help us build new tools and analyse what was happening.

• Newspeak House, an absolutely legendary institution in the world of political technology, who let us use the space in the run up to the election and who host an incredible community of political technologists.

• Our funders, without whom none of this happens.

• Anyone who’s fought for greater platform transparency and nudged the cause forwards over the last few years (this includes advocacy orgs, policy experts and yes, the people at platforms who built the tools we all use to try and work out what’s going on).

Lastly… what’s next?

Who Targets Me works on lots of elections. There’s a huge one coming up in the US. There may be an election in Ireland before the end of the year. Next year there’s Australia, Canada and Germany (among others).

Our goal is to continue to turn our work on political ads into ‘infrastructure’ anyone covering elections can use. This means more tools to look at spending, targeting and messaging. It means creating ‘recipes’ on how to report on the use of digital ads in politics (and digital campaigning more broadly). It means extending our browser extension to cover more platforms. It’ll mean more use of automation and translation make all this data accessible.

Alongside all that, this newsletter will continue to publish regularly, covering a mixture of campaign analysis, interviews with practitioners and policy thinking about digital ads in elections wherever they’re taking place.

If you find it useful, please share it with someone else who you think would do the same:

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Today we’re looking at the varied approaches taken by the minor parties. While the overall story of this election looks likely to be a Labour victory, the extent of their majority is arguably dependent on the fortunes of parties across the UK who are the local challengers to the Conservatives.

The fact that the Tories are fighting on multiple fronts has been a huge challenge for them, especially since Nigel Farage belatedly entered the race for Reform UK to boost their effort. But whether the challenge translates to the implosion some polls predict depends on whether small parties can convince enough undecided or otherwise-inclined voters to lend their tactical weight.

In this post we’ll look at digital campaigns by the Lib Dems, Reform UK, SNP and the Green Party.

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Overview of campaign spending to date

An overview of Meta ad spending:

• Of the £5.5m spent between 22 May (when the election was called) and 28 June (the latest data available), £905,968 was spent by smaller parties.

• The Green Party outspent the Lib Dems in the period before election spending limits came into play (22-30 May). Since then the two parties have spent roughly equal sums on Meta.

• For the Greens, Lib Dems and SNP, the main party pages are by far the largest spenders, dwarfing any candidate or party leader.

• Reform UK has spent £370,710 despite entering the campaign late and only beginning to ratchet up Meta spending since 16th June. Since 24 June, it has outspent the Conservatives.

• A significant majority of Reform’s spending has been through Nigel Farage’s page - £255,707 to 28 June, with just £91,382 through the party’s main page.

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Lib Dems: harmonised focus on campaigners and tactical voting

The Lib Dems have bought Meta ads across 192 pages. That’s almost 4 times the number of active pages used by Reform, Greens and the SNP - giving a sense of the greater ambition Ed Davey’s party has, and its greater number of second-places in 2019.

This difference can also be seen in the content of Lib Dem ads, which are firmly focused on two priorities: galvanising younger activists to participate in the campaign effort, and building a longer-term sense of momentum behind the party. Ads therefore tend to look like this:

As you’d expect, this also translates to a low number of ads designed for a national or general audience. Postcode-based targeting is the norm for the Lib Dems. Over the past 7 days for which Meta data is available (24-30 June), just 4% was targeted at the UK as a whole.

When we feed the party’s latest location data (24 June - 1 July) onto the Who Targets Me spending map, the picture becomes even clearer. There is next to no funding going into constituencies where the Lib Dems stand no chance of competing, and the M3/A303 corridor down to the south west is palpably the main focus:

Finally, the Lib Dems have been using digital ad spend as a fundraising tool throughout the election. Today, with just a few days to go, they are emphasising the potential impact of the Daily Mail’s ‘tactical voting advice’. This is of course advice designed to ensure that readers can avoid a ‘Starmer supermajority’:

While it’s questionable whether a paper with a circulation around 735,000 can sway the right voters in the right seats, the Lib Dems are seeing it as an opportunity to appeal to members and activists specifically around online ads:

The Green Party - pockets of winnable potential

The Green Party always has difficult choices to make at a general election. Its resources are dwarfed even by the Lib Dems, and it traditionally struggles to make inroads given many of its candidates are facing Labour opposition.

However, there is a palpable sense of excitement from the Green campaign in this election. This excitement comes from the possibility of retaining Brighton Pavilion, adding Bristol Central - where Labour voices are pessimistic about Thangam Debbonaire’s chances - and potentially even challenging in at least 2 Conservative seats.

It is no surprise given these vital battlegrounds that the map of Green Party spending is highly focused, like this:

Those dark patches of spending reflect the party’s hopes in Waveney Valley and North Herefordshire, as well as Brighton Pavilion and Bristol Central. 

There are a couple of interesting editorial choices about the Greens’ ads. 

Firstly, they’ve moved away from direct attacks on Labour. Instead, they are now focused on using the prospect of a ‘supermajority’ to emphasise the safety of voting Green. Like this:

Secondly, the Greens are the only party whose Meta ads are typically seen by more women than men. This is despite none of their audiences being deliberately targeted in this way.

Thirdly, their ads at the moment don’t tend to mention specific seats. There’s clearly an effort to normalise the Green Party’s role in the make-up of Parliament generally. It remains to be seen whether co-opting the Conservatives’ argument on accountability in a ‘supermajority’ will serve the Greens well.

Reform UK - only making fans for Nigel

Looking at spending over time, you get a very clear sense of how the ‘Reform surge’ has been matched by a rapidly expanding digital ad footprint:

While the party’s glitzy event in Birmingham this weekend received breathless write-ups from certain of the nation’s tabloids and even some of its more moderate political editors, the amount of cash splashed on filling the room was enormous.

In fact, as we pointed out, the spend on Facebook ads promoting the event (which around 4,500 people attended) was greater than the revenues generated by ticket sales. 

But ads bought after the event suggest that the party (or Farage) is well pleased with how the event turned out. Current live ads show lengthy videos with Richard Tice and Anne Widdecombe speaking. That said, it’s unclear whether even the most fervent Reform supporter would watch a 14 minute video, or what they are intended to encourage them to do.

The event and its ad spend is a microcosm of the wider digital campaign. The whole logic of that is to boost the reputation of one man, and one man only: Nigel Farage. As we pointed out above, for every £1 spent on Reform’s main Meta ad page, almost £3 has been spent on Farage’s profile.

Unusually for a minor party, Reform has also spent a significant amount of cash on a small number of Google search ads - over £50k since 19 June. You’re considerably more likely to have seen a Reform ad than a Conservative one over the last week:

Reform is likely to continue spending big in the final few days of the election. It’s been one of the more successful smaller parties in terms of fundraising during the campaign. 

SNP - policy-heavy, light on reach

The SNP is another party that’s been… embattled in this election. With the memory of Nicola Sturgeon and her husband being arrested, and with the coffers almost entirely empty, it’s no surprise that the SNP has been outspent many times over even by other smaller competitors.

The saving grace, of course, is that unlike the Lib Dems or Greens, the SNP is only fighting in one part of the UK. While the party has only spent £43,697 on Meta ads since the election was called, it’s likely that this compares reasonably well to those parties’ spend in Scotland alone.

But our map suggests - in line with the vast majority of polling - that the SNP faces considerable losses. Look at how other parties were on the front foot immediately after 22nd May, and how that developed mid-campaign (7-14 June):

Without the anchoring effect of two key elements - a highly recognisable, experienced leader capable of generating sympathetic media in Westminster, and the golden promise of a serious prospect of independence - the SNP faces fights on many fronts.

When we look at the ads they’ve put out, it’s unsurprising then that they’ve pushed a message that places them firmly to the left of the Labour Party under Keir Starmer:

As we saw in the TV debates, these lines often receive sympathetic hearings from left-leaning voters, including in the rest of the UK. The question is whether, in key Scottish seats, that will be enough to overcome the recent scandals engulfing the SNP in Holyrood.

What conclusions can we draw?

There’s a clear divide in digital strategies in this election - and it applies across the board.

Our analysis of the strategies employed here shows that some parties have real clarity of thought on what their digital spend is for. We could include among those:

• Labour, whose well-financed blanket campaign projects confidence and consistency

• The Lib Dems, whose targeted, repetitive, candidate-focused ads are designed to work in harmony with their real-world pavement politics

• The Greens, who have also maximised the resources going into winnable seats and are capitalising on their growing base in local government

• Reform UK, who believe in presidential politics and have spent accordingly

Except in the latter case, where a couple of polls have changed the messaging significantly, each of these parties has stuck to its initial narrative. 

The Tories and SNP by contrast have run digital campaigns that reflect their inner turmoil. While we still expect the Conservatives to go for a blanketing of ads in the final 48 hours, the SNP’s limited resources have forced it away from serious targeting and promoting local candidates, instead favouring a broad national message.

The final verdict will be delivered later this week, but reading the runes of the online campaign makes it clear who the winners and losers are likely to be.

Overall activity by the two campaigns

An overview of Meta ad spending:

• Labour and the Tories have spent just over £3M on Meta ads so far. 

• We estimate that to be somewhere north of 400M ad impressions.

• £1.9M (63%) of this was spent by Labour, £1.1M (37%) Tory.

• We’ve seen 926 advertisers affiliated with the two parties run ads at some point during the campaign. 518 have been Labour and 408 Conservative.

Between the two parties, the highest spending page has been the main Conservatives account, which has bought £693,000 worth of ads since the start of the campaign. Labour splits its spending across lots of pages, with Keir Starmer’s (£243,000) slightly leading the main Labour account (£223,000). Labour has also run a significant amount of ads through the Scottish and Welsh Labour accounts as well as a number of shadow frontbenchers’ pages.

Looking at spending over time, including all candidates and local pages, you get this, with Labour taking an early lead and holding it fairly comfortably:

The Tory campaign has been more centralised than Labour’s, with £748,000 (74%) coming from just four HQ-controlled pages: The Conservatives, Rishi Sunak, “Keir Starmer Needs You” and “What’s Happening?”. By contrast, Labour candidates have spent over £1m (59% of their total) while HQ-controlled accounts have bought £770,000 (41%) of ads.

Lastly, in terms of the cost of advertising, the Tories appear have paid around £9 per thousand impressions for their Meta ads. Labour are getting their ads cheaper, at £4.94 per thousand ads (though ads from Keir Starmer’s page have been a little more expensive, at £6.27 per thousand impressions). This is because Labour have chosen to use less expensive targeting methods. (These numbers are based on the total spend of their main page and the maximum number of impressions it has bought since May 22nd).

What about ads on Google?

Since the start of the campaign, Labour has bought £1.1M worth of Google (YouTube, search and display) ads (with £749k of that on video). In addition, Scottish Labour has bought £56k worth (all video) and London Labour £53k (also all video).

Over the same period, the Tories have spent just £114,000 on Google ads (of which £96,000 has been video). The Scottish Conservatives haven’t bought any.

Labour are way ahead here (as are Meta ads, which the two main parties are using three times as often as Google’s).

The Tory campaign (so far) in paid ads

• On Meta, the Conservatives have run 1,686 ads using 89 different creatives (combinations of copy, images and/or video).

• Their main page has bought up to 47.9M impressions of ads.

• 1,412 of their ads (83.7%) mention “Labour”

• 261 (15%) mention “Keir Starmer”

• 194 (11%) mention “Reform”

• Just 20 (1.1%) mention Rishi Sunak

Of the 1,686 ads they’ve run, only seven (0.4%), costing approximately £10,000 (1% of their budget), have mentioned Tory policy plans. Those ran from the 12th-19th June and haven’t run again since. If any number showed how theirs is a “don’t vote Labour” campaign, rather than a “vote Tory” campaign, it’s this.

The single biggest ad they’ve run is titled “Labour’s Tax Trap Manifesto”, which has cost them £70-95,000 so far. Based on the average price they’ve been paying for ads, that will have bought them somewhere between 7 and 11M ad impressions of this message.

The Tories’ ads are also littered with, at best, questionable claims. “Keir Starmer will force a local ULEZ on you”, “Keir Starmer will force pay per mile driving, costing you £THOUSANDS a year”, “Keir Starmer is coming for your savings” and “Angela Rayner will end our nuclear deterrent” (this last one in particular… really?).

Now, we aren’t fans of the idea of regulating the content of political ads. It’s neither politically nor practically possible. If you tried to regulate these Tory ads, the content would switch from “Keir Starmer will…” to “Keir Starmer could…” and nothing would change, other than we’d now have an expensive regulator sat around doing very little. Transparency, as long as people who care about this stuff are using it, is imperfect, but it’s the best solution we have.

On Google, the Conservatives have run just 36 ads, with their campaign launch video still the largest, running 9-10M times. A different “tax trap” video, mentioning the in/famous £2094 figure, has run 6M times. They’ve run no new content on Google in two weeks.

How are the Tories targeting their ads?

Tory Meta ads have used Custom and Lookalike Audiences as their primary targeting methods, with location targeting being used only by candidates. The Tory Google ads haven’t used any location targeting either. They’ve simply blanketed the whole of England and Wales.

It’s not obvious how best to interpret this. At first glance, the party’s idea would seem to be to use data they’ve previously collected as a seed for Lookalike Audiences to expand the reach of their ads. This is fine if you want to reach lots of people who Meta thinks might appreciate your message. It sort of makes sense if you’re worried about losing vote share to another party. But, as Reform are about to find out, vote share doesn’t matter very much. Without any kind of geographical targeting, ads will show up in all sorts of electorally irrelevant places (particularly given the polling, which suggests the Tories currently have hundreds of electorally irrelevant places). 

A different way of thinking about it is that the HQ-controlled pages are running the ‘air war’, while individual candidates are running their own local ground effort. This could make sense, but the Tory spend on local campaigning is relatively low too.

If we look at postcode ad targeting for the Tories (again, this is just constituency campaigns - the main page is doing no geo-targeting that we can see), the places being targeted haven’t changed much over time. The left map is the first week of the campaign, the right map is the most recent week. Perhaps a little more around the Wales/England border, but they’re broadly similar.

The contrast with previous elections is quite stark. In 2019, the Tories ran ads that clearly showed the places they were trying to win. The ads literally named the seats they were going for. Based on what we can see in the Meta transparency data, no such plan exists this time around. The national campaign is putting down a layer of attack ads, while the local campaigns are being left to their own devices. The lack of coordination between the two is astonishing.

The Labour campaign in digital ads

On Meta, Labour’s main page has run 5,508 ads with 79 different creatives:

• It has bought (at most) 45.0M impressions.

• 235 (4%) of the ads mention “Conservatives”

• 579 (11%) ads use the word “Tory” and a further 189 (3%) “Tories”

• 93 (1.6%) ads mention Rishi Sunak (Truss and Johnson get no mentions).

• “Change” appears in 1198 (22%) of the ads.

Keir Starmer’s page (the largest Labour page by spend) has run 2,546 ads with 24 different creatives:

• Buying up to 37.6M impressions so far.

• 83 (3%) mention “Conservative”

• 332 (13%) ads mention “Tory”

• 1931 (76%) mention “Change”, of which 238 (9%) mention the “six first steps for change”

• The biggest ad “No gimmicks, no quick fixes” (up to 8.9M impressions)

On Google, Labour has run 6,980 ads, with a big peak in spending just before the dissolution of parliament. Since then it’s been £15-25,000/day.

How are Labour targeting their ads?

This election campaign has seen a big shift in the way Labour target their ads. In 2017 and 2019, armed with a big membership database and a barrelload of email signups, Labour ads would use Custom Audiences to try to find and mobilise existing supporters. The model was “these supporters can give us money and time and they can make our content more authentic by sharing it with their family and friends”.

That approach is gone in 2024, with most of Labour’s targeting now being geographical (Note that “City”, as seen in the above chart, is a somewhat confusing label Meta puts on all sorts of places of any size. For example, it considers ‘Swadlingcote’ and ‘Kegworth’ and ‘Swynnerton’ to be ‘cities’). Labour’s fundraising and mobilisation asks via ads have also dropped off, and are now very much secondary to the direct promotion of persuasive content. 

What does all that geographical targeting look like?

Like the Tory map, it’s roughly the same today as it was a month ago.

The key differences between the two campaigns

Like elsewhere, it’s hard to find much good news for the Tories in this data. They’re paying more for fewer ads. They’re reaching fewer people, in a more diffuse, less targeted way. A lot of their advertising effort seems to be wasted, going into a national campaign that doesn’t support candidates in seats they might hope to hold. In terms of content, their message has jumped around, trying to deter people from voting for Reform, before settling on attacking Labour on tax and pensions. The tone has been relentlessly negative and they’ve had little to say about their own plans. They’ve lacked a central character, with the PM being entirely absent from the digital campaign since the first week, and there’s been no supporting cast of cabinet members to help out.

The Labour campaign has largely been the mirror image of the Tory one. They started faster, seem to be more efficient in the way they’re spending money, are getting cheaper ads, have better coordination between national and local campaigns, have stayed consistent in their message and promoted (albeit in a very general sense), their plans for the future. They had a plan, and have stuck with it rigidly.

Given public scepticism of their record and the unpopularity of their leader, this might have been the campaign the Tories had to fight. But even if this is true, the Tory digital campaign appears to be littered with strategic and tactical mistakes. For Labour, to adopt some Euro 2024 language, “you can only beat what’s put in front of you”. The Tory digital campaign will cost them a handful of seats, and add to the scale of a historic defeat.

We’ll be back with a look at the approaches the Lib Dems, Greens, SNP and Reform before the end of the week.

Thanks for reading,

Who Targets Me

Things you can do:

• Install our browser extension to see who targets you in the last 10 days of the campaign

• Explore ad spending patterns with our Trends tool

• See who’s running ads in your constituency with our new map

• Look at the targeting strategies of the two parties with our dashboard

• Take a look at the ad libraries of Meta and Google

Having exceeded expectations and ‘beaten’ Keir Starmer (albeit by a tiny margin in a single poll, which other polls later contradicted), you’d have expected the Conservative campaign to make full use of his best moments in front of the cameras in their digital campaign the next day.

Instead, at least in terms of their paid ads, it’s been virtual silence ever since. While Labour launched ads showing Keir Starmer’s best bits from the debate, the Conservative ad campaigns went quiet, got quieter, then stopped entirely.

At the time of writing, and following Sunak’s self-inflicted D-Day gaffe, every single digital ad on their main pages has been switched off. Currently, the campaign has no active ads on Facebook, Instagram, Google or YouTube.

Most notably, the ad making the claim at the centre of Sunak’s debate ‘victory’ (that Labour would hike taxes by £2,000 over the next parliament) and which many expected would be repeated ad infinitum right up to polling day, stopped too. The Conservatives had spent nearly £40k on it, and by the time of the debate it had already been running for several days and been shown up to 10 million times. It’s now gone like all the rest.

Until this point, the Conservatives had focused their advertising spend on the profile of typical Reform UK voters: mostly men, mostly over 45 years old, with interests in issues like the monarchy, the military, and immigration.  This approach was aligned with their stated strategy - an attempt to limit the electoral damage on their right flank.

But following the return of Nigel Farage, both the wider Conservative political strategy - and from our particular perspective the party’s digital marketing strategy - seem to have been blown to bits. Since becoming PM, Rishi Sunak has tried several different angles in an attempt to find something that works. He’s had a go at ‘change’, ‘continuity’, ‘toughness’ and being the man with a plan in an uncertain world. None has shifted the dial. Now the rightward pivot to reclaim Reform voters for the Tories is gone too.

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A highly centralised campaign

If the national campaign has been blown off course, perhaps it could be rescued by what’s happening locally? But there the Tory campaign has been very quiet too. While Conservative spending on its main Meta pages has run above Labour’s since the election announcement on 22nd May, once you include local candidate spending, the numbers look very different.

The Tories’ main pages have outspent Labour £447,000 to £331,000 on Meta since May 22nd. But once you include local pages, Labour has outspent the Tories on Meta by £1,147,000 to £638,000. 

The parties are clearly taking different approaches. Two-thirds of Labour’s paid digital campaign (so far), has gone through candidates. By contrast, around 70% of Tory ad spending has come from the main party page. This would seem to speak further to the Tories’ lack of preparation for this campaign, with many MPs standing down, changing seats and a large number of late candidate selections taking place. 

(Note that the local campaigns taper off as the short campaign spending limits kicked in for them after the dissolution of parliament last week. They’re much more constrained from here on, and we’d expect main party page spending to dominate from here on).

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Why might this be happening?

While stopping running campaign ads might appear to be a sign of a campaign in distress, it’s not the only possible cause.

First, varying a campaign’s tempo is perfectly normal. Labour has also slowed their spending compared to the first week of the campaign. Everyone, including voters, needs a break, even in a campaign as short as a British one. The most obvious way for a campaign to do this is to start and finish fast. A week from now, the Conservative and Labour digital campaigns will likely be back in full flow, spending £50-100k+ a day on ads and reaching millions with them. This is a pause, not a stop, and much more is to come.

Second, the Tory focus on national ad spending from the main party page is a choice. It’s one that gives the central campaign a lot of control of message, targeting and pacing. But it means that when you slow down or stop spending from your main accounts, the whole campaign is affected. By contrast, Labour’s approach is riskier, as it allows their candidates to do their own thing and potentially go off-message. So far though, they seem to have that under control. 

Finally, the slowdown, then stop, of the paid digital campaign could actually be the result of organisational breakdown and loss of control. Farage’s arrival on the scene makes it very hard to see how the Conservatives can now bring Reform supporters back into the fold, and the D-Day gaffe will make this even harder. The party has already spent hundreds of thousands of pounds on digital ads trying to reach this audience. Continuing to do so would be throwing good money after bad. The arrival of Farage has scrambled their strategy, the polls are going the wrong way and now other things are too. Meetings will be taking place, decisions will need to be made, and in the meantime everything just grinds to a halt.

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So what now?

Some difficult decisions lie ahead for Rishi Sunak and Isaac Levido, his campaign director.

There are some milestones left in the campaign, particularly the launch of the party’s manifesto (most likely next week) along with leader interviews and the remaining debates. There’s also the possibility that Labour has a big future campaign gaffe up their sleeve that they can jump on. These sorts of things can act as tactical hooks for the digital campaign, but to benefit from them the Conservatives will need to be more responsive than they’ve been to date. As football managers often say when they’re losing badly at half-time - “let’s win the second half”.

They can also switch towards the overt defence of seats, focusing on the ones they have to hold onto if they’re to stay relevant in the next parliament. We’ve read reports that their internal benchmark is 150 seats - equivalent to over 200 losses. This would suggest there’s a range of seats 25-50 seats either side of those with a 15,000 current Tory majority that will be the focus of campaigning from here on.

Next week, we’ll be launching a constituency map of the UK showing where ads are being targeted. The seats the parties are defending (and attacking) in will show up there. Here’s a sneak preview (before you spend too much time with the magnifying glass, remember that there’s a lot more ad spending to come):

Thanks for reading. More soon!

Team Full Disclosure @ Who Targets Me

Please install WTM’s browser extension to help us monitor all the major parties’ digital campaigns. The next four weeks will help us conduct critical research into the way parties run modern campaigns, as well as into the impact of platforms on elections.

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And a reminder that all the charts and data we create are available via trends.whotargets.me.

Given that the Prime Minister was in control of the election timetable, you might have expected the Tories to slickly roll out a well-laid plan. And while they’ve been able to get some real world events and visits going, it’s obvious their digital channels aren’t yet where they should be.

By contrast, Labour seems to have made a fast start.

Let’s go through what’s happened so far in a bit more detail.

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The Tories first 24hrs

Immediately after the announcement of the election, the party had a few graphics ready to go on its Twitter/X account, as well as some video clips of the announcement. These showed up on Facebook and Instagram later.

But from there, the follow up was slow to come.

Well planned, well resourced campaigns (such as those in the US), have a clear launch timetable, with all of their digital channels ready to fire out material immediately after the public announcement.

But, in keeping with yesterday’s announcement, the Tory digital campaign has so far been a slow drip-drip of activity, rather than a torrential flood of energy.

By 11pm last night we spotted they had some active Meta ads. These try to set out the turf for the election - “Stick with our clear plan” versus the risk of “No plan” with Labour. They look like this:

So far, there are 39 of these ads, costing a total of £7,000ish since last night, and they’ve been shown over a million times. They’re mostly reaching older voters.

Perhaps notably, for a campaign where the question the Conservatives are trying to pose is “which person is the right leader for the country?” (for example by offering Starmer six TV debates), Sunak has no active ads as of the afternoon of the 23rd. This is what you get when you search them in the Meta Ad Library:

Going beyond ads, the other basic pieces of a slick modern digital political campaign also seem to have been overlooked. There’s been no email to supporters to ask them to donate or volunteer, nor any changes made to the website, which looks essentially the same as it did a month ago.

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And of course that’s just the party HQ controlled stuff.

Because of the surprise announcement, we’ve not yet seen any other collateral out there for Tory MPs and candidates to work with (as a result, most have just pulled their ad campaigns and are currently inactive). There’s been nothing from the local or regional parties, nor from the Scottish or Welsh Conservatives.

The only place where there’s some activity is the party’s “Share2Win” app/mini-social network, where activists are prompted to share posts created by the party in return for virtual coins. This post featuring Keir Starmer appears to have a hundred shares.

Overall though it’s quiet. Too quiet.

This will change of course over the coming days, but at this point of a campaign committed, enthusiastic supporters and volunteers are looking for things to do, but they’re being given nothing. The party has time to turn it around, but not that much. Some midnight oil will surely be burned in CCHQ over the coming days.

***STOP PRESS***

The party just launched these ads attacking Labour for opposing the Rwanda policy. They’re going negative early, and trying to push Labour-curious ex-Tory-voting Reform supporters back into the blue column (try saying that five times quickly). At least that’s what it’s being reported as.

***STOP STOP PRESS***

The party’s first email just went out, a fundraiser from Richard Holden, rather than Rishi Sunak.

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Labour’s first day

By contrast, Labour, despite the election being as much of a surprise for them as it was for the rest of us, are up and running.

They have ads live for both the party and Keir Starmer’s page. Starmer’s focus on his “change” theme for the election, while the party’s ad tries to recruit volunteers (likely from existing supporters and members).

Clicking the “volunteer” call to action takes you off to a tool where you can input your postcode and get assigned to a target seat nearby (well, within 100 miles).

So far today, based on the counter on the site, it looks as if a couple of thousand people have signed up since the election was announced.

Overnight, the Labour website has also had a lick of election paint, with the (extremely simple) campaign slogan “Change.” plastered up on the homepage, as well as clear calls to action to donate and join the campaign.

The party has also emailed at least three times, with a quickfire message from Keir Starmer yesterday, followed by two fundraising appeals since. This suggests an operation that’s set up to get content out quickly, with a better plan, a more empowered team and clearer sign off processes than the Tories would seem to have at this stage.

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And the others?

The Liberal Democrats have had some ads live for a few days. Fortunately for them, they still work. The Green Party got an email out almost immediately after the announcement. Reform held a press conference this morning and updated their website.

One down, 42 to go…

It’s only the first full day of the campaign, and it would be wrong to draw too strong a conclusion from it. Some of this early advantage is blind luck for Labour - they didn’t know the election was coming, but the continual rumours about various election dates throughout the first half of the year probably contributed to them feeling like they needed to be ready, whereas the Tory apparatus, knowing it held the calendar, looks like it was preparing for an election later on.

The big unanswered question as regards digital at this point is what resources the two main party campaigns will have. If the Conservatives have more money (thanks to the new spending limits) and run wave after wave of attacks on Labour in the coming weeks, that could start to have an effect.

Equally, Labour might be ready to match or even exceed the Tories’ resources, as they have done (just about) this year. Given their poll lead, that would give the party some comfort, as they’ll be able to respond to any negativity in kind.

Just 42 days to go… a long time in digital politics.

Until next time,

Team Full Disclosure

Links:

• Keep up with campaign digital ad spending with our Trends dashboards. They’re better than the ones Meta and Google offer.

• You can also track spending on a per-party basis (just click a party name on one of the dashboards), and by way of a bonus, we’ve started doing some AI-generated content weekly summaries of the ads their top pages are running.

We usually try and make these newsletters somewhat thematic, but beyond “it’s about digital political ads again”, today’s is going to jump about a bit. We’re going to look at three things - whether we’re seeing any evidence of a May election, whether Google’s data (what there is of it) tells us anything about the state of the campaign, and we’ll finish up with a first quick look at the London Mayoral campaign.

If there’s anything you think we should be looking at, drop us a note. And if you like what we do and want to support our work (particularly if you use it for your own work), do consider a paid subscription.

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Does Tory ad spending tell us we’re headed for a May election?

The short answer is no, but some people seem to think it’s still a possibility, so let’s take a moment to look at what they’re up to at the moment.

The longer answer is this - the overall trends in ad spending seem fairly settled at the moment, with Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer trading places as the spendiest political advertiser on Meta in the UK. It really depends on the timeframe you’re looking at. As you get closer to today, the pattern gets less clear.

Overall, Sunak has spent £383,000 on Meta ads in the last three months, while Starmer is at £233,000. Their respective party pages have spent £68,000 and £124,000, meaning that over the last 90 days, Sunak and the Tories are ahead by about £100,000. That will have bough them around 60 million ad impressions (versus 50 million for Labour).

If you only focus on the last month’s worth of data, Sunak is at £111,000, while Starmer has spent £102,000. During this period, Labour (across a few pages) pretty much matched the main Conservative Party page spend. Pretty comparable then, at least on Meta. But Sunak has also bought a £30,000 YouTube ad, so overall, he’s still the biggest spender of the last four weeks.

But in the last week, Starmer is on £23,000, Sunak on £16,000. Starmer is ahead here. On the 28th February, Starmer spent over £11,000, while Sunak spent just £1,400. So a big gap, the other way, versus the prevailing trend of the last few months. Ad transparency can act as a signal. Maybe Labour’s just reminding the Tories that for them, with the polls the way they are, the date doesn’t matter all that much.

The chart that shows all this is this one, which aggregates spending from just under 500 active Tory and Labour advertisers (we track 4,700 of them, most of whom are dormant):

It shows a Sunak-shaped hump in the first couple of weeks of February, before it all settles back down again over the last couple of weeks.

What can we draw from this? What would “preparing for an election” actually look like?

The answer, we think, is “not this” (though we’ll see what the inevitable post-Budget surge in ads looks like in a few days time).

In our view, ads showing the Tories getting ready for a May election would involve:

1. More money being spent (rather than being pretty flat, as we’re seeing at the moment). You’d expect it to increase week over week, particularly if the Conservatives are going to blow a full £35m+ on the election campaign.

2. Geographical targeting (which the main Tory pages aren’t doing right now). All the Tory ads at the moment are targeted with “lookalike audiences” (upload some people, Facebook finds you more who are like them), but there’s no geographical restriction on any of it, meaning the ads are being sprayed around the UK, quite possibly to places where they’re of little use. Until we start to see some postcode targeting, we’re not seeing even a whiff of pre-election activity.

3. Having active candidates (there are too few at the moment). We’ve seen 236 Conservative Party advertisers in the last week. But that’s not very many for a party that’ll be standing candidates in 600+ seats. If a May election is going to be called, Number 10 hasn’t given a whiff of that to the candidates who’ll be fighting it. Add in the fact that there are still lots of seats without candidates…

4. Having a clear and consistent message (we’re not seeing this either). Sunak has his five priorities, but they really come and go in his ads. For a while, he was running ads about his economic plan and how it was working. The ad ran on Meta (expensively - it cost £40,000) until the 14th February. But on the 15th, the UK officially fell into recession and the ad was pulled. In December, he spent £10,000 on an ad about stopping small boats, but that was almost three months ago and there’s been nothing on it since. He spent over £20,000 advertising for people to follow him on WhatsApp. 19,000 people have done it so far. Those ads stopped a week ago, and nothing has replaced them. 19,000 WhatsApp followers does not an effective digital strategy make.

All four of these point in the opposite direction to “imminent election” as far as we’re concerned. As far as we can tell, there’s no discernible pattern to any of it. If the PM does spring a May poll on us, it’ll look a lot more like a snap election than it should, given the Conservatives have had since 2019 to plan for it (albeit with a little turbulence along the way).

So it’ll be later in the year, we think.

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Is anyone else up to much?

Not really. It’s all about the biggest two parties at the moment. Here’s a rundown of what everyone’s been up to over the last month.

(The ‘other’ category includes government and government-y things like the Electoral Commission, non-party campaigners and so on. Added up, they spend quite a lot, but there’s no aggregate direction to what they do. For example, the UK Government’s Facebook page has been running a big campaign about the 2nd anniversary of the war in Ukraine. This is government comms - it’s not really trying to win any votes).

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Google’s weird transparency finally shows us something

In the past, we’ve regularly complained about just how bad Google is at doing political ad transparency. Their policy for covering “electoral ads” is really, really narrow, and they seem to interpret it even more narrowly (and often very randomly).

Here’s their policy explaining what they consider a political ad in the UK:

—

Election ads in the United Kingdom

In the UK, election ads include ads that feature:

• a political party, current elected officeholder, or candidate for the UK Parliament

• a referendum question up for vote, a referendum campaign group, or a call to vote related to a national referendum or a regional referendum on sovereignty

—

But when you look at their ad library, why are most of the ads from media outlets (such as The Economist, The Times and The Telegraph)? These don’t seem to fit the policy at all. Why is every Scottish Labour ad included, but almost nothing from UK Labour? Did we really have a run of by-elections with no candidate from any party running a single ad on a Google platform? Have no candidates for Parliament this year started a campaign yet?

It all feels very unlikely, making it very hard to trust the accuracy or comprehensiveness of their ad library at all. We find it deeply weird that such a big company, with such enormous resources and increasing regulatory scrutiny, can’t produce trustworthy data.

All that said, of late, a few Tory and Labour ads have actually shown up in their data, and that’s welcome.

Firstly, there’s the £30,000 Sunak “Why our economic plan is working” ad we mentioned above. Notably, it started running after the Facebook version had stopped (and after the announcement that Britain was in recession). It’s still running today and has been shown up to 5 million times in the last couple of weeks. Unlike Sunak’s Facebook ads, this ad is postcode targeted, reaching about 900 postcode districts (e.g. SW18). There are around 3,000 of those in the UK in total, so the ad is appearing to about a third of the country at the moment. (Note: We’re starting to build some tools to map these in more detail, as postcode targeting is going to tell us a lot about where the campaign battlegrounds will be.)

Some Labour ads have also shown up in Google’s data in recent days. The party has started buying a few on behalf of candidates, each of whom is running a short “about me” type explainer video.

There are only seven of them at the moment, and they’re for a fairly esoteric bunch of seats, but you can see the value for money in doing this. For a few hundred pounds, your ad will appear to people living in and around your target constituency a few hundred thousand times. Given you might only need 30,000 votes to win the seat, and a lot of people are on YouTube, you’re putting your message in front of the right people, where they are, many times over. For the sake of comparison, £500 either buys you 370 First Class Stamps or it’ll get you 70,000 YouTube ad impressions. It’s about 200 times cheaper to reach someone with a video ad than a piece of post - an easy choice for these candidates to make at this point of the campaign, as they try and build their own profile in the seat.

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What’s going on in London?

There are local elections in May (campaigning starts late for these, so nothing to see yet), but the London Mayoral campaign is starting to get going, with both Labour’s Sadiq Khan and Conservative Susan Hall running ad campaigns.

It’s all quite negative.

Khan’s ads (£20k’s worth, all run via the “London Labour Party” page) attack Hall.

Alongside these, Khan, as Mayor, has the benefit of running ads in his role as Mayor (paid for by the GLA). There he can ensure plenty of people can see what he’s been up to. They aren’t campaign ads per se, focusing on policies and new Mayoral initiatives, but “Sadiq Khan” is on all of them, just as it’ll be on every polling card come May. The ads have cost £110,000 over the last three months. It’s one of the big advantage of incumbency, and a further challenge for Hall, who’s a mile behind in the polls.

With Khan attacking her in so many of his ads, how does she respond? Well, in much the same way really. As far as we can see, every single ad Hall has run since she started doing so (1st Feb this year), has attacked Sadiq Khan. They look like this:

A lot of heat then, but not much light for Londoners. Both campaigns will see this as an effective strategy to try to define their opponent’s weaknesses, but it’s not very edifying stuff. Right now, not one of the other Mayoral candidates is running any ads. Perhaps they’ll raise the tone a bit when they do.

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That’s it for this issue. Please:

• Share this post if you enjoyed it. There’s a button a couple of lines up.

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Thanks for reading!

Team Full Disclosure / Who Targets Me

For this issue, we talked with two esteemed British political scientists - Professors Kate Dommett (Sheffield) and Tim Bale (Queen Mary University of London) about digital and the forthcoming UK election campaign. We wondered what they thought had changed in the ‘digital campaign’ era, and asked them what they thought might happen next. Both conversations are below.

Alongside that, we’ve been working on some improvements to our Trends tool, which we’ll launch very soon, and doing a lot more election planning for the UK, and elsewhere. News on that soon.

In ads this week, the Tories have switched the taps back on again, averaging around £10,000/day spent on Meta. Labour has run at about half that. The other parties… are still nowhere to be seen. Election 2024 doesn’t seem like it’s going to be a fair fight.

In the by-election campaigns, Labour’s candidates in Kingswood and Wellingborough outspent their Tory opponents 3:1 in the last week. Reform spent a bit promoting Ben Habib in Wellingborough.

If you’re interested in who’s seeing digital political ads in the UK, and the methods people are using to target voters, Fabio Votta has put together a dashboard tracking it.

Six months ago, this would have felt like a busy week in UK online ads. Since Christmas, £100,000+ spent in a week feels like par for the course. The Tories say they’re hoping to raise and spend £100m on this election (you have to assume this includes the spending of their candidates too). It’s not quite American election money, and it’ll mostly get funnelled through the two biggest parties, but they can’t splurge it on TV or radio ads, so where’s it going to go?

The next issue will be more data-heavy. Promise (threat?).

Back soon,

Team Full Disclosure

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Kate Dommett is Professor in Digital Politics at the University of Sheffield. Kate has a new book out, titled “Data-driven Campaigning and Political Parties Five Advanced Democracies Compared”. She and her co-writers interviewed 328 practitioners to write it (including us). It’s a fascinating look at digital political campaigning from the inside-out.

Full Disclosure: Kate, thanks for chatting. Why did you decide to write this book?

Prof Kate Dommett: In the wake of Cambridge Analytica, we saw a lot of coverage around the use of data, that we were all being manipulated through our personal data being gathered and being used to target us with messaging that was going to affect our vote.

I had a lot of questions about that narrative. So the book is about trying to work out - what do we actually mean by data-driven campaigning? What data is being collected and how does it vary in different countries, what analysis is happening and what's the day-to-day use, as opposed to the extreme, high-profile cases such as Cambridge Analytica?

FD: You seem to start from the position that these things are a bit overhyped - that there’s more hype than reality. Is that because of the way campaigns actually function?

KD: The book is really about political parties. I think anyone who studies them knows they’re not the most sophisticated organisations. Outside the US, they’re run on a limited budget, and so they aren’t the sites of innovation we sometimes see talked about. Our hunch was that they were a lot less sophisticated than was often being said, so our interest was in understanding the party factors, regulatory factors and features of the national system in which the parties operate. How does all that affect the likelihood of them doing sophisticated things?

FD: If you’re saying the general practices may be less good than some of the hype might have you believe, it’d be interesting to know whether you think about some of the examples considered “top of the tree”. For example Dominic Cummings work on the Brexit referendum, or the aforementioned Cambridge Analytica. Were they particularly good at data driven campaigning?

KD: I think we need to be really careful about listening to people who are trying to put a particular position across and sell their success and expertise for future elections. Parties are quite risk averse organisations. They can gain from using data, but they also have a lot to lose from using it badly. We know that voters don’t really like invasive uses of data, and we also know from campaigners that they’ve experienced something of a backlash when trying something a bit too personalised or invasive.

Electoral gurus have always tried to sell you on the idea they had a huge impact on elections, but at the same time, we know having an impact on a campaign is tricky - there are so many factors outside your control.

Our work has therefore been to look at the day-to-day of campaigning and what happens routinely throughout the year. It’s that practice we should be looking at, rather than the outlier cases where the reporters might not actually be that reliable.

FD: You generally found that campaigning practices were perhaps not quite as terrifying as many people believe they are. Should we just accept this as being the way it is? What does data-driven campaigning look like when it goes too far?

KD: We’re not saying it’s entirely unproblematic, but we are saying that it shouldn’t be automatically assumed to be problematic. The problems are often culturally or systemically specific. There’s not one set of practices that are uniformly awful. Without some understanding of context, we can’t say what is and isn’t ok.

For example, in majoritarian electoral systems, like the UK, you do see specific targeting of groups while large parts of the electorate are totally ignored. That’s obviously problematic if you believe everyone should be engaged and receive information. But you don’t see the same thing in proportional systems, where parties have to reach out and talk to wider groups of people.

You need to work out what your ideals and goals are, and how the particular dynamics of your system operate and the incentives this creates, before you think about responding through privacy regulation, but could involve media or campaign regulation too. The book is about that too - the way problematic practices depend on the norms at work.

FD: What about upsides and benefits? What do you think the people you’ve talked to think they’re getting out of being more data driven?

KD: We asked all of our interviewees about what they saw as the ethical dilemmas of using data, and most of them didn’t really understand the question. Many said something along the lines of “we’re using information to contact voters to inform them about elections and how to get involved. That’s a good thing”.

It’s an interesting standpoint to flip it around. They’re people whose job it is to get the message out, and they’re trying to find people, and engage them with things they hope are interesting in a busy information environment. There’s actually a lot of potential in that, it’s just that certain tactics, such as the need to grab attention, might have negative consequences for the tone of political debate.

FD: Did you find that parties and campaigners were able to quantify the value they get from digital campaigning?

KD: They’d like to think they can, but the metrics they’re able to gather, things like engagement, clicks and so on are very hard to connect to the outcomes of elections. What people say on the doorstep, or do on the internet, can be quite different to what they’re going to do in the voting booth, so it’s a really difficult challenge.

FD: This year there are lots of elections. The UK’s will be the most expensive in history, and the US one may be too. With so many going on, you might expect to see a rapid change in the state of the art when it comes to digital campaigning. As a researcher, what would you be interested in learning about in 2024?

KD: I’m interested in the party side of things, particularly the integration of the different parts of the campaign. We've tended to see digital and the access to data that you can get through digital campaigning has often stayed quite separate to the rest of a campaign, because parties struggle to join things up. Bigger parties can do it. They can bring together in-person voter ID data, email addresses and so on and use that to serve ads. But smaller parties don’t have the capacity to link up their operations in that way. At the moment, the big parties are doing some quite extensive data collection activity online, which suggests they’re going to be pretty integrated, so it’ll be interesting to see how well the party machine can now operate as a single entity.

FD: What do you actually predict will happen in 2024? For the first time since 2015, the UK parties can actually plan for the election. They can hire, they can budget, they can sequence. From a pure campaigning technique, they should be more capable than ever?

KD: I think even with the changes to the platforms, which makes some campaigning more difficult for them, they’re going to be active across more platforms than we’ve seen in the past. Previously, they’ve only really managed presences on Google and Meta products, and even things like Instagram have been less used. This time I think they’ll invest in a larger number of platforms.

I also don’t think we’re going to see much micro-targeting, in the sense of parties trying to reach voters on the basis of multiple voter characteristics. There will be lots of geographical targeting, but overall, we’ll see them trying to reach quite broad groups.

Lastly, I think I’m expecting less innovation. US campaigns used to really expand what was possible, but everything is more set up now, and campaigns are having to work around different barriers and limitations imposed by the different platforms. They’ll try new things, but it’ll be less ground-breaking than before, and I think a lot of time will be spent optimising what works.

FD: Thanks so much Kate. Perhaps we’ll chat again after the election and get some answers to those questions!

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Tim Bale is Professor of Politics at Queen Mary University of London. After every election, he’s part of the team (along with Professors Rob Ford and Will Jennings) that literally writes the book on what happened. He’s an active commentator on British politics, particularly on social media.

Full Disclosure: Tim - thanks for chatting with us. Let’s start with a small one. What do you think the impacts of the internet have been on politics generally, as well as specifically on campaigns?

Tim Bale: I think in terms of the internal politics of political parties, the internet has has accelerated the decline of deference among MPs, which has meant there are far more problems managing parties for leaders than there ever were before. Social media means people can quickly become a legend in their own lunchtimes, and they don't necessarily need to do the kind of hard yards they might have had to previously to gain some kind of profile. This has quite badly disrupted political parties.

Alongside this, if we zoom out, it's made a difference in terms of lowering the barrier to entry for new parties. For example, I find it quite hard to believe that the Brexit Party would have made such a splash in the pre-internet age.

There’s also quite a difference with regard to campaigning. It’s always said, time and time again, that the next election is going to be the “internet election” and it’s never quite been true, at least in the sense of the internet being the primary channel. But you’d be on pretty solid ground arguing that since 2015 there has been a big shift in terms of focus and spending on digital as the public's attention has moved away from broadcast and print towards social media. Overall, I don’t think it’s blown up campaigning as much as people suggested it would, though that could change.

FD: In your work you write a lot about conservative and right-wing parties. Do you think the internet favours them more than their left wing opponents?

TB: Social media is a personalising media, and a hot, rather than a cold media, so it’s bound to favour people who are charismatic, and offer sharp, simple, polarising solutions to problems. And in as much as there is often a divide between the right, (which tends to think that way) and the left (which tends to look at the world structural terms) it probably does favour the right. Having said that, there are populist left wing parties - SYRIZA in Greece or Podemos in Spain who have been successful for a time. But on average, populist right wingers have made better use of it.

FD: On the promise of whether parties have truly delivered a “digital election”, obviously the UK spending limits have just gone up massively. What do you think the dynamics of parties suddenly having many millions extra to spend will be?

TB: Election years are fundraising opportunities for parties to make the kind of money that they can then spend over the next four on the boring stuff like staffing, logistics, rent, etc. It’s worth remembering that. As for the election itself, you'll see that Labour and the Conservatives are playing in the Premier League, whereas everybody else is playing in the Championship. Just as playing in the Premier League gives you access to better players, it means they’re likely to be at a huge advantage.

The extra money will allow them more scope for experimentation. It’ll give them a chance to try things out before the autumn, which will then inform what they actually do during the campaign. They’ll be able to test their messages and ads, and ultimately to put them in front of more eyeballs. So we’ll just see more Facebook ads, more time on YouTube, more paid search terms on Google. While in the past you had to be more discerning about where you ran your ads and how much you spent, they’ll be able to saturate more this time.

FD: There are quite a few changes this election - new spending limits, voter ID, imprints on digital material. But a lot of people still complain about the way that British elections are regulated. How do you feel things are? What do you think needs to change?

TB: I think we're in a complete mess. Any incoming government, if they've got any sense of propriety or duty to democracy, will actually need to do something about the way that digital is regulated as far as campaigning goes. We’ll need to do something to make it more transparent and they should also look at reimposing slightly lower spending limits, unless we want some sort of arms race in the future.

The problem is that there’s no real incentive for the big parties to do anything about a system that favours them over their competitors. It’s the same as for proportional representation. It would probably make sense for Labour in the long term to favour PR, but in the short term, once they win, they’re not interested in it because the system worked for them.

I do worry that, in the end, nothing much will happen.

FD: As someone who works to understand and document what goes on in elections, what do you hope to learn in 2024?

TB: One thing that is difficult to get at is how parties integrate their digital campaign with their campaign on the ground. In the 1960s, people started to say that boots on the ground wouldn’t matter as much, because television was becoming so important. But that never quite turned out to be the case. There always had to be some sort of integration. We've seen people argue the same thing for digital. In the end, some people do still read leaflets, however briefly, before they shove them in the bin. People still do want to be contacted by campaigns and there is evidence to suggest that both leafleting and voter contact actually make a positive difference to people's willingness to vote and to vote in particular ways.

I’m also interested in how parties cope with the fact their digital campaigns are, to some extent, more distributed and democratised than they were before. Less centrally controlled. And that means there’s opportunities there, but also risks. How do they decide what the balance is, is going to be really interesting.

FD: Thanks again Tim. Best of luck with the big book of Election 2024 (proposed alternative title: Election 2025).

The Facebook Ad Library, tells us Rishi Sunak spent £42,093 on ads on the platform in the week from Christmas Day to New Year’s Eve, and just under £85,000 over the last month.

Mostly, that money went into ads asking people to follow his Facebook page, targeting those who 'look like' his existing page followers. In return, he's seen his page follower count grow by around 100,000 users (from 700k to just over 800k) since the beginning of December.

Sunak's ad spending is massive - an unprecedented amount for a UK politician outside of an election campaign. For example, Boris Johnson 'only' ever bought £254,000 worth of FB ads, including the 2019 campaign period. At the current rate, Sunak (£138,000 in total Facebook ad spending, ever) will pass Johnson’s score in the next four to five weeks, well before the earliest predicted date for the start of an election campaign. And of course once that starts, the number will go up and up.

In the most recent party donation figures, the Tories enjoyed a big fundraising advantage in Q3 2023, with Lord John Sainsbury giving them £10m, meaning they outraised Labour by that number. While both main parties seem confident they'll raise and spend more than they ever have before in 2024, having the money in the bank early is something the Tories are now taking advantage of in the form of a big push on digital ads. We think that’s a foretaste of just how digital 2024 will be.

So what can we learn from Sunak’s Christmas splurge?

1. Can it tell us the election date?

Are the Tories spending now to prepare for a May election? Perhaps. They're definitely spending earlier than you might expect for a November date, but for us, it’s not enough to say for sure. Spending can go up, but it can also come down. Sunak spent almost nothing in 2023, until he suddenly started doing so late in the year. Furthermore, the Tories haven’t done much with any of their digital assets since 2019 (Labour have been more consistent in their approach), so this could just be a surge designed to catch them up a bit, acquire some fresh data and get things moving in the right direction. If their spending continues over the next few weeks, and/or they start to run some ads on other services, then that would be a stronger signal for a May election.

But what about November? £40k a week is a lot on ads, but even if they sustain that level of spending all the way through to November, it adds up to *only* £1.8m. That's just 5% of the maximum allowable party spend (£34m-ish) this time. With the limit increasing by £16m-ish this year, there's plenty of headroom to 'go long', and still have plenty left over to spend a large amount in the final weeks once the election has been formally called. £10k a day could just be the new normal.

But surely this means they couldn’t go to January 2025? From a spending point of view, early ‘25 isn’t that different to November. There’s lots of reasons not to, but having now run so many ads over Christmas, they would likely have a better sense of what kind of response they’d get if they were campaigning this time next year. So probably not, but they still could if they felt they had to.

In sum, on election timing, the ads show a big increase in activity, but for us they still don’t point conclusively towards May. One benefit of this is that it keeps Labour and everyone else guessing, tempting them to start spending big money to keep up. But this could be costly if they get it wrong, particularly if they find it hard to raise a similar amount. The problem is keeping your own side guessing too, making it harder for your own candidates to know when to spark up their own campaigns.

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2. Does it tell us how the campaign will be fought?

It's notable that the ads are trying to get people to follow Sunak's page, rather than the main Tory party one. It’s absolutely obvious that Sunak is going to be front and centre in his party’s campaign, but this is another data point in support of the ‘presidential’ style it’ll take. He polls a bit ahead of his party, albeit the gap isn’t as wide as it was, so a campaign based on trying to get people to choose a Prime Minister, rather than a government, makes some sense (although it’s not that simple - he still polls behind Starmer as 'best PM').

The risk is that this is less good for individual Tory candidates in marginals where the Sunak brand doesn’t help, nor is it much use for May’s local and mayoral elections. It’s also of no use at all over the longer term, should Sunak fail to win and the party need a new leader (by way of comparison, Boris Johnson's 2m Facebook followers now get one quite random post each month. Like the man himself, it’s out of the game).

Sunak’s ads are very generic, with just a simple request to “follow my page” and a photo of him in various campaign-y situations (in front of a Christmas tree, meeting soldiers, with some kids in a school). People who click them are more likely, but not guaranteed, thanks to the FB algorithm, to see more of his posts organically. Other than that, there's no attempt at communication or persuasion here. If you're engaging with the ads, you’re either already a likely Tory voter, or at least a bit Sunak-curious. They aren’t about finding issues that might resonate with swing voters. The idea is simple - to create direct lines of ongoing communication with as many supporters as possible, without needing to go through the media. Nothing new here - this has been a common goal for all digital campaigns since about 2008.

The only ad with a bit of a message (more a brand/vibe really) is a short video, with fast cuts, a focus on "priorities" and Sunak "working day and night to deliver them". Sunak wants to be seen as energetic, across all the key issues and managing each of them towards success. Again, the goal of the video is for people to like his page, but it at least serves some dual purpose, in trying to get his personal brand across.

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3. Does it show us who the key voters are?

These are Facebook ads. As you might expect for a party that tends to find most of its support among older voters, there’s not much effort here to reach the youngest ones (in fact, many of the ads are explicitly targeted at voters over 25). That said, they are being shown primarily to those between 25 and 45, and of those, mostly men.

Beyond that, there’s not much to see. None of the ads are geographically targeted at any constituencies or postcodes. A handful are even reaching Northern Ireland, where the Tories won’t stand any candidates, which seems a little wasteful. In due course, the party will want to focus its efforts on reaching the (many) seats it might need to hold to stay in government, as well as those (few) it thinks it can win. At that point, the election strategy - the “who we need to target”, the “what we want to say to them” and the “how much we're prepared to invest to do it” - will be revealed. No sign of that yet.

Why is he using Facebook, but not YouTube or Twitter?

You can still reach a lot of people and build a following on Facebook, which is what Sunak is doing. Once you have these people in your orbit, it's relatively easier to push them towards other channels (email, clicking links, watching videos, signing up to volunteer, donating). It's not a perfect option, but there's none better for him at this stage of the campaign.

On the other hand, you can't really do any of this on YouTube, without making lots of video. When the time is right, the parties will buy a lot of YouTube ads, but this will be in the more ‘broadcast’ phase of the campaign, in the final weeks.

By contrast lots of political types are on Twitter, but most voters aren't. Buying ads can get you in front of those people, but it's not going to result in many votes, one way or the other. Plus you have to hand over money to Elon Musk. (Reminder: TikTok doesn't accept political ads, nor does LinkedIn, and everywhere else is too small to bother with).

4. Does it mean Labour and the other opposition parties should start to worry?

Labour probably won't be too concerned at this point. They're likely to also have plenty of money ready to spend on campaigning (along with their 15-20 point lead in the polls). That Sunak is reaching people with fairly generic ads, and has increased his Facebook following by 100k in a month isn't a decisive fact in the context of an election with 30 million-ish voters. We expect Labour to get more active over the next few weeks, with their their main pages (the party page and Starmer's) going from hundreds of pounds a day to thousands. In short, there’s nothing to stop Labour doing exactly the same as Sunak and reaching millions of voters with digital ads in the coming months.

For different reasons, the Liberal Democrats also won't be too worried. The list of seats they care about for 2024 is small, and the broad, untargeted nature of Sunak's campaign means that the Tory 'defence' of those seats hasn't really begun. There’s just no point in them trying to compete in a broad, national campaign.

But it could concern Reform a bit. The promised return of Farage with a £10m war chest hasn’t yet materialised, and if an election does now show up in May, that's not a lot of time to get things set up. Plus Sunak likely is reaching people they will want to talk to if they're to actually harm the Tories in the election. At some point soon, election bat-signals like Sunak's ad spending are going to force them to commit.

The other smaller parties - the SNP, the Greens, Plaid Cymru - will be looking on jealously at the amount of money the Tories are able to spend. None of them ever got anywhere near their election spending limits, and there's no reason to believe they'll suddenly find a load more money for their campaigns before the next election. The bar has been raised, and only the big two can hope to clear it.

5. So now what?

This is the first ‘planned’ election year since 2015. The way the campaigns deploy their ad budgets, and the ability to track those in near realtime with transparency tool is a major difference with that first “Facebook election” nearly a decade ago. The key things to look out for are:

• Does spending continue at the current level, slow, or speed up (signalling May)?

• When will we start to see YouTube ads?

• When will we see constituency-by-constituency differences in spending, as the campaigns start to focus on their key seats?

• Which issues emerge? How will Sunak try to show success in achieving his priority policy goals? How will Starmer set out the Labour programme more clearly?

• How much will be tailored to specific groups of voters, versus being visible to everyone?

• Are the issues online different to the ones that play out in the media? (For example, British voters love to get heated about anything to do with animals. The sewage issue just doesn’t seem to go away).

More, as always, as we see it.

You can follow us on Twitter/X, BlueSky and Threads. You can monitor Meta ad spending for yourself via our Trends tool, or install our browser extension to find out more about the ads that target you. If you find our work useful and want to support it, please consider making a donation! And if you want to get involved, please get in touch.

Thanks for reading,

Team Full Disclosure @ Who Targets Me

Last Monday, the Government used a “Statutory Instrument” to unilaterally increase spending limits for political parties in UK General Elections by 80%, rising from £30,000 per seat they contest, to £54,000.

In 2019, the major parties stood in roughly 630 seats. If they do the same next year, they'll both have spending limits of around £34m (up from just under £19m in 2019). The increase reflects inflation since the thresholds were set in 2000, but the lack of consultation has worried many, particularly those from smaller parties, for whom the previous thresholds were already neck-craningly high.

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But let’s ignore them for now - after all, there are still only two possible winners of British elections. If you’re sat in one of their HQs today, the new spending limits force you to answer two questions:

1. How do we raise an extra £15m?

2. How do we spend an extra £15m?

Let's start with 1. How to raise it.

If you're in Tory HQ, you’ll need to attract major donors. The party simply doesn't have the membership to raise £15m from small donations. This is why you don’t see many fundraising ads from the party. As always, the Tories will need big donors to come through for them. One way of making that happen, is to tell them how innovative and cutting edge your campaign is going to be. “We’re using AI to target voters” and “we’ll be running a hyper-tested and segmented ad campaign” is the sort of pitch that might loosen half a million out of a donor’s pocket.

If you're in Labour HQ on the other hand, you will be able to lean on your party members for at least some money. One way to get to £15m is to get 300,000 of them to give you an additional £50 each. That isn't going to happen, but you might get 10-20% of the way there with small donations.

To do it, you'll need to send a lot of emails and run a lot of ads targeted at party members to solicit donations. The prospect of change should make Labour members feel pretty motivated to support the party in this way, but a lot will depend on being able to create a sense of urgency (in the US, the Democrats are currently failing to do this, and their fundraising numbers are way down on the 2020 campaign).

So Labour will be able to tell a story about grassroots fundraising success, and having a member-powered campaign, but it will still need large sums from individual and corporate donors, as well as the unions, if they’re to reach their target. There’s no guarantee they’ll do it (in 2019, they were outspent by the Liberal Democrats), but the wind is in their favour.

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Now onto 2. How to spend it.

Campaign strategy is about choices. With a 'mere' £19m, the choices used to be starker. Now with £35m, you have a lot more freedom.

The Electoral Commission's data says parties spend about 65% of their budget on "unsolicited material" and "advertising". 15% goes on "Polling and research". 5% is spent on "Events and rallies", with the remaining 15% on "overheads" and "other items".

One version of the future is that these proportions stay roughly the same. The pie gets larger, but the distribution doesn’t change. The other version sees both the pie growing, and the distribution changing.

We think that latter scenario is where the UK is headed, with two areas getting more investment.

One is the use of agencies and consultants. A lot of campaign work in Britain is done by agencies at pro- or low-bono rates in the hope of preferential treatment when it comes to winning future business with a newly or re- elected government. Most (all?) of the agencies who have worked with the Conservatives over the last 13 years have benefitted in this way.

An optimistic view is that paying them properly will lead to a more honest relationship between campaigns and their agencies/consultants. It might also lead to better work, as agencies can put in more effort (it probably won’t, but we can live in hope for now).

The second area, and by far the most important, is digital ads. Britain doesn't allow political TV or radio ads. Parties used to buy billboards, but the modern strategy for those is to launch them with the media present, get half a day's media coverage from it, and not spend any actual money putting them up anywhere. Parties do create lots of leaflets, and send some direct mail, but the former require volunteers to deliver them, whereas the latter is quite expensive (parties get the first piece of mail for free, but for a second... have you seen the price of a First Class stamp recently?).

Digital ads, on the other hand, are still cheap and reach a lot of people. Some might tell you the 'real' digital election is happening elsewhere ("on Whatsapp", "in local groups", "bots and AI!"), but for a political party, digital ads are the safe option - predictable, configurable and controllable. You can use them hit target seats and voters with messages you think they'll want to hear, and you can do it time and again. Ads never get tired or need pizza. They don't care if it's raining. They aren’t reliant on fancy, untested technology. They don't even care if you've seen them before, they'll just keep on coming.

Since buying digital ads became commonplace in British political campaigns in 2015, spending on them has increased at each election. Electoral Commission records show that the main party campaigns have, in that time, spent around £13m on Facebook, Google, Snapchat and Twitter ads. Given the extra headroom the new spending limits offer, we wouldn't be *that* surprised if one of the big parties spent more than £10m on digital ads at the next election. If they do, their opponent will want to try and do the same. Such is the logic of political campaigns (and it’s going to be a great couple of months for the political ad sales folks at Facebook and Google.)

If that happens, voters in marginal seats will notice a big difference. In the space of a few weeks, roughly 5 million voters, in around 100 seats, will see approximately 2 billion political ads (a very back of the envelope calculation, but of those orders of magnitude).

What does this mean for British campaigns?

We’ve had “the digital campaign” since around 2010, when it meant having a half decent website, an email list and a few gimmicks (such as “Webcameron”). By 2015, social media and paid ads were added to the toolkit. By 2019, digital campaigns were as much a broadcast medium as any other (see the way the Tories used YouTube ads in that campaign), sitting atop the more targeted version, where every possible audience is accessible, provided you have the message and money to reach them.

Unfortunately, the accountability system we need for this increased volume of campaigning and advertising hasn’t really caught up. Apart from the forthcoming introduction of ‘digital imprints’ (which finally catches digital communication up with paper), there’s been no new law for a long time.

And journalism hasn’t really caught up either. There continues to be a lot of coverage of digital novelties in campaigns (this time it’ll be deepfakes and generative AI, following on from the previous cycles of Russians-in-the-machine and bots), but no outlet in the UK currently treats party digital campaigning like a ‘beat’, as they do when they send reporters to follow the Prime Minister or opposition leader from campaign stop to campaign stop. Broadcasters and newspapers spend many millions of pounds doing the traditional type of campaign reporting, but almost nothing trying to deeply understand what’s happening on the internet.

We find this frustrating, because the story of how campaigns think they’ll win is written in their ads, which show where they think they can win, who they’ll need to persuade to do so, and how much effort they’ll have to put in to do it. Show us a list of postcodes and the amount a party is spending in them, and we’ll tell you exactly which seats they think they can win. Would you get such a straight answer from a party press officer or campaign manager? We think not.

The ad transparency we’ve campaigned for over the last 6 years is (mostly) here. With a mammoth increase in online political ads on the way, it’s time to use it*.

Until next time,

Team FD

* If you’re a journalist wondering how to cover UK digital campaigning better, do get in touch. We have loads of ideas to make your outlet’s coverage the best in the business for GE2024.

Yesterday morning we nearly choked on our Weetabix (cold milk, sprinkle of sugar) when Politico’s London Playbook landed in our inbox proclaiming “the government has published a trio of documents saying artificial intelligence will take us to hell in a handcart with sabotaged elections” (that being just one of a laundry list of future AI risks which may or may not come to pass in our lifetimes). 

Ahead of next week’s global AI Summit at Bletchley Park, this sort of breathless rhetoric has been par for the course. The best minds of our AI generation have been ordered to Buckinghamshire to wargame “frontier AI risk” - the term the government uses to describe the existential ‘rise of the machines’ scenarios that seem to go hand in hand with the still-vague ‘transformative benefits’ of this new technology. 

So (being us) we reviewed these new documents to see what they actually had to say about elections and data. The papers noted that “frontier AI can be misused to deliberately spread false information to create disruption, persuade people on political issues, or cause other forms of harm or damage”, and that “generative AI tools have already been shown capable of persuading humans on political issues and can be used to increase the scale, persuasiveness and frequency of disinformation and misinformation. More generally, generative AI can generate hyper-targeted content with unprecedented scale and sophistication.”

Yes, well, while that’s all *possible*, recent history has shown us you don’t need frontier AI, or indeed any AI, to bring some or all of those factors into play during an election campaign. AI could act as a force multiplier for the creation and dissemination of misinformation and disinformation, the manipulation of public opinion, the targeting of voters with personalised content created by intrusive exploitations of personal data, the hacking of election systems, and the disruption of electoral officials and monitoring organisations. And so the threats of generative AI are certainly worth thorough consideration. But to frame these electoral threats as AI issues, which can be met with AI solutions (conveniently provided by the vendors who have taken out stands in the summit exhibition hall), is to miss the point.

Next year will see at least 58 elections in 54 countries, including the US, India, Russia, across Europe, and almost certainly in the UK. Over two billion people will cast their votes. Like the orbiting of some great democratic comet, we won’t see another year with as many elections until 2048. 

Each and every one of these elections has the potential to suffer the worst of what we’ve seen in politics and elections in recent years. AI could automate and increase some aspects of these problems. But it won’t create them from scratch. The disinformation and disruption machines aren’t yet pushing their own buttons - people are, including many electoral campaigns, and as we know all too well, many electoral candidates themselves. We shouldn’t forget that we already have a powerful tool to fight back against this, by trying to ensure campaigns that mislead us pay as heavy an electoral price as possible. 

Beyond our own agency, there’s another layer that separates us, and can protect us, from bad actors. Disruptive, undemocratic content can’t travel alone. It needs to be chaperoned through the social networks and platforms we all use if we’re to see it, believe it, and be fooled by it. 

If our social networks become flooded with this material will anyone want to use them any more? If your phone constantly rings with scams, is it sensible to answer it? Gmail became successful not because it stopped spam outright, but because it stopped it from hitting your inbox. If misleading generative AI content starts to circulate at scale, social networks are going to have to solve the problem, or they simply won’t function any more. It’s in the interests of platforms to try to stop an AI trickle turning into an AI flood. If they can’t, it’ll cost them their businesses.

We worry that the focus on frontier AI’s impact on democracy distracts us from the real preparatory work necessary to better secure forthcoming elections. Those preparations need to be technical, political, structural and legal. They need to look back to recent lessons learnt in the real world, rather than looking too far ahead. And those preparations need to remember that you don’t need a million AI bots to attempt to overthrow an election: you just need the right moment, and the wrong person.

Many of the ideas we need to ‘protect’ us from marauding AI threats are the same as the ones we’ve been calling for over the last few years - transparency, accountability, trying to avoid excessive targeting, personalisation and information overload. If we implement them now, we will erect some significant barriers against these threats.

We’re already preparing for next year’s run of elections (just like we have for the last six and a half years), backing up ideas about how to ensure the integrity of elections with data showing what politicians and parties actually do. It’s because of that experience that we’re not exactly losing sleep about AI, frontier or otherwise. 

But we do worry that in the breathless political environment and hype around AI, our not being too worried about AI makes our argument too… boring to be heard.

And for us that’s a consequence of frontier AI that we will lose some sleep over.

Here’s a reminder that you can track what politicians and parties are actually doing with their online ad campaigns using our Trends tool, which tracks nearly 60,000 political advertisers in over 50 countries.

Thanks for reading. More from us soon.

Team Full Disclosure @ Who Targets Me

At the bottom of the email, you’ll also find a link to a new tool we’ve built to help track millions of pounds, dollars and euros worth of Meta political ad spending across the world.

Please do try it out and let us know what you think.

The Rutherglen and Hamilton West by-election

The SNP very rarely buy digital ads outside of General Election campaigns. That said, there’s only been one by-election in Scotland in this parliament (Airdrie and Shotts, which they won, and only really happened for the technical reason that SNP members aren’t allowed to sit in Westminster and Holyrood at the same time), and the 2021 Scottish Parliament election was a bit of a non-event.

So Rutherglen and Hamilton West, taking place after the recall of Margaret Ferrier, is the first electoral test the party has faced in a while.

And so, they’re spending money - quite a lot of money - despite being odds-on to lose the seat. In the 30 days to 30th Sept, the party spent £4,600 on Meta ads targeting the constituency. These have bought in the region of 1.5m impressions - a lot in a place where there are only 30-40k voters likely to turn out, of whom perhaps only half are active on Facebook or Instagram. Basic maths suggests it’s been hard for those people to avoid SNP ads in recent weeks.

Of the SNP ads, there are two on the theme of independence (only 15k impressions so far, but active):

And these two (an odd thing to note - the one on the left, with a black background, is mostly targeted at men, the one on the right, with a yellow background, is targeted at women. If you know why that might be, let us know). About 20k impressions for these so far.

Alongside these, there are a number of ads focused on what “Westminster” does to (for?) Scotland.

On the Labour side, Michael Shanks, their candidate, has spent £1,250 in the last month on his ads, running messages on two themes - first, winning the seat off the SNP, but also being part of the wider effort to put Labour into government over the next year or so.

One interesting detail of his video ads is the timer - very much the digital version of the doorstep campaigner’s “do you have a minute to talk?”.

85% of Shanks’ ads use “lookalike audiences” to reach their audience (versus the SNP’s strict focus on postcode-based targeting). It’s very hard to say which approach is more effective or efficient - the SNP’s “blanket the place” approach, or Labour’s “try and get the algorithms to show the ads to the right people”. With Labour favourites to take the seat, they’ll likely be the ones who get to say they “ran a great campaign”, while the SNP head back to the electoral map to work out what they can do better next year.

We can’t see any SNP ads on YouTube, but the Scottish Labour Party have run £600 worth in the last month, largely with the same content as their Meta ads. Here’s Google’s map of where they’re running versus the constituency boundaries (from parliament.uk):

FWIW, the Tories (Thomas Kerr) and Liberal Democrats (Gloria Adebo) aren’t wasting a penny on a campaign they won’t win.

The by-election is today. If you’re voting, don’t forget your ID. You only have a few hours left.

Tamworth

The Tamworth by-election, coming after the resignation of Conservative MP Chris Pincher following allegations of sexual misconduct, is on October 19th. He had a near 20,000 majority in the seat after 2019.

Labour’s candidate in Tamworth, Sarah Edwards, has spent over £2,600 on Facebook ads in the last month, while her primary opponent, the Tory candidate Andrew Cooper, a former soldier and a local councillor for the last two years, has spent less than a fifth of that.

Their ads often compete over the same issues. For example in one ad Edwards argues that police numbers in Staffordshire have fallen by 400 officers. In one of his, Cooper says there are now 333 more (if anyone knows the truth, let us know…).

The Conservatives have also run ads claiming that Edwards doesn’t live in the constituency, describing her as “Keir Starmer’s candidate from Birmingham” who “doesn’t get our priorities". Edwards has responded with her own ads, telling viewers “I live in Tamworth, pay my council tax in Tamworth, my food, my gas, my electric.”

As these straight-to-camera ads go, it’s a pretty good, natural performance (most candidate video ads are stiff and overly scripted, which is one reason why TikTok hasn’t really taken off among British politicians). It’s a skill many more are going to have to work on if they’re to communicate with voters on the channels they use.

Mid-Bedfordshire

Nadine Dorries’ former seat is probably the most competitive of all, mainly because Labour and the Liberal Democrats both think they can win (and, because they might split the anti-Tory vote between them, the Tories will think they can win too).

As a result, everyone’s trying to siphon votes from everyone else. Here’s Labour East (one of the party’s several regional pages that run ads) trying to do exactly that:

And here’s the Central Bedfordshire Liberal Democrats doing exactly the same thing (while throwing in a “not a local candidate” for good measure):

But the main game is the Tories trying to “do an Uxbridge” and turn the campaign into a single-issue referendum. Rather than ULEZ, this time it’s the Green Belt, with their candidate, Festus Akinbusoye, donning the Barbour and heading out into the fields to claim “Keir Starmer will concrete over our Green Belt”.

By way of rebuttal, Labour’s candidate, Alistair Strathern, also takes to the fields to say he’ll “oppose any development that doesn’t have the right infrastructure”. Not quite the same thing, but certainly not a full-throated support for rampant concreting.

Speaking of fields, let’s get into the weeds of postcode targeting for a second. In Mid-Beds, Labour is targeting 20 postcode segments (e.g. MK45 5), the Liberal Democrats are targeting 17, while the Tories are targeting just 8. After some data-wrangling based on what we know about the number of people living in each area, we find, of a total population of 100,076, the Tories are reaching areas with 73,876 inhabitants, the Liberal Democrats 97,366 and Labour 100,034.

It’s only a one off campaign, but it’s interesting to note that the Tories are either a) being efficient, and only trying to reach areas where they think its support is most dense or b) aren’t working with a good model for the geography of the area. If, when it comes to the General Election next year, the Tories ‘forget’ to target 25% of voters because their constituency maps are bad, that could be a significant problem for them. We’ll keep an eye out.

Introducing our new spending tracker, Trends

For the last few months, we’ve been working to improve the way we track ad spending by developing a new tool called Trends. Using Meta’s daily Ad Library Report (a spreadsheet of how much political advertisers have spent on ads), we’ve worked to tag over 55,000 political advertisers across the world with their party affiliation. In the UK, this means we’re able to track the spending activities of over 7,500 advertisers across all the main UK parties as well as those in Northern Ireland.

The tool (still in beta as we refine a few things) offers day-by-day tracking of Meta ad spending, a cumulative tracker showing spending over time, the share of spending over time, the share of spending for any given time period and a leaderboard that you can filter by party and download as a .csv file

The advantages over Meta’s spending tools are:

• You can filter for any time period (not just 1, 7, 30, 90 days)

• All of the spam and non-political advertisers are filtered out, so it’s just advertisers that are relevant for elections

• Everything is downloadable

• We’re doing this in over 50 countries (and growing)

In the future, we’re aiming to add:

• Google spending

• More ‘trends’ (how spending is changing over time, where advertisers rank)

• The ability to create custom reports and focus in on just a few actors

• Tens of thousands more advertisers in many more countries

• Better ways of understanding how ads are targeted

• Automated analysis of ads’ themes

• Things you think it needs (just let us know).

Try Trends

That’s all for this time. Let us know if you see anything you think we should cover.

Thanks!

Team Full Disclosure.

To support work like this newsletter, Trends, our browser extension and everything else, please consider donating to Who Targets Me.

Next week, we’ll be checking in on the various by-election campaigns in Mid Beds, Tamworth and Rutherglen and Hamilton West. We’ll also introduce a new spending tracker we’ve been working on.

Lastly, please share this newsletter with others. There’s (likely) just over a year to go until the election, and lots of money will be spent on ads and more over in the coming months. The job of this newsletter is to try and explain what we see parties and candidates doing with those to as many people as possible. Getting more subscribers is the best way to do that!

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And now to our conversation with Craig…

Full Disclosure: Thanks for agreeing to chat, Craig. We appreciate you taking the time. Now, you worked in digital politics for a long while - almost since the beginning. When did you actually start at the Conservative Party and what was your role when you did?

Craig Elder: I joined in September 2006. What makes it feel like such a long time ago was that I was the second hire into the brand new “New Media Team” at Conservative Party HQ, when I was midway through a PhD in English (which will always remain unfinished).

Back then I could build websites and communicate, and I was interested in politics, so I got the gig. So I was there for the four years that followed, up to the 2010 election, was promoted a couple of times. And obviously that period - 2006 to 2010 - well, I think we all recognise is the period where digital politics got real. And so as time was passing, and almost by default, we were becoming more and more important within the organisation, quite often because of what was actually happening not just inside the party and UK politics, but what was happening across the Atlantic, where the Obama election dragged all of us into this magical new world where digital politics was quite the thing.

FD: How did you get to being fully in charge of digital for the party in 2015?

CE: I split the role with Tom (Edmonds). He did the creative stuff and I did the digital stuff. On the 2015 election campaign, you had Lynton Crosby (Australian election strategist and pollster), Stephen Gilbert, in charge of the ground campaign, the Directors of Research and Comms (Alex Dawson and Giles Kenningham), and you had Tom and I. So we had managed to somehow get two seats around the top table, which was pretty great.

Tom and I had gone away in between 2010 and 2013 and were doing our own thing. I was perfectly happy where I was, working for a comms agency called Blue Rubicon - where I wanted to stay. So the party needed to make it worth our while to come back. 2010 had been a lot of fun, we had a blast, but it would be totally inaccurate to say that digital was at the heart of that campaign. We told them we wanted a bigger role and we aren’t really prepared to come back unless we got it. Back then we’d done a lot of fun and weird stuff - WebCameron, re-skinning a beat ‘em up game - but it was getting us two inches of coverage in the Standard, so really, did it matter all that much? In 2015, we wanted to drag digital from the periphery and put it at the heart of the campaign.

What this meant was us learning how to plug digital into the overall campaign strategy as directed by Lynton, as well as how it could fit into that more traditional part of the campaign as directed by Stephen. And that’s where you start to say, how does digital help with identifying, talking to and persuading voters in marginal constituencies, getting involved in the ground war side of things rather than the air war? It’s easy to give yourself a pat on the back when you win, but much of the credit goes to Lynton for taking what we were doing seriously.

We did have to prove ourselves to get there though, and to do that we ran a series of test campaigns through 2013 and 2014 to show how, with a small pot of money, we could actually reach and talk to the voters we felt we needed. Because those tests were successful, we were able to turn on the taps a bit more. And so we need to give credit to Stephen there too, as the money we were spending would traditionally have gone to leaflets or phone canvassing or posters - his part of the campaign. Lastly, Andrew Feldman, who was party chair, signed off on us spending £1.2m on digital ads. Perhaps that seems like small beer now, but it completely dwarfed Labour’s budget and changed the terms of what was possible in British campaigns. By 2017, Labour was spending the same or more than us.

FD: Social media changed a lot between the 2010 and 2015 elections, in particular, it went from an organic medium to at least, in part, a paid one. Facebook really got advertising going during that period. You seemed ready to take their advice and spend money, whereas Labour, and Hillary in 2016, didn’t. Is that the right interpretation?

CE: I don’t think it was as much taking Facebook’s advice as running the tests and seeing what the evidence was. Initially we ran it through an agency, but by the end we were doing it all ourselves because it gave us more control.

The main thing was conveying the idea of a “Long Term Economic Plan”. So we would do things around creating jobs and investment. We set up basic landing pages, one had a form where it’d do a tax calculator based on your salary and tell you what the coalition had saved you. Another was on on business. We ran the ads for 8 or 10 weeks and kept getting back numbers we couldn’t believe - less than 10p per conversion. So that allowed us to go to Lynton and show him how, if you put money in, voters would come out.

FD: Jim Messina (Obama 2012 campaign manager) was also involved?

CE: Jim’s a great guy, but he was a consultant, not a full time member of staff. He’d jet in and give us advice - real advice, he wasn’t a vanity hire. During the campaign he did two massive things for us. One is that he helped give us more credibility. Everyone knew he talked sense, and him telling others “guys, you should back this, they have a good plan” was really important. Second, his team put in a real shift - they were right beside us, late nights and all. It was a proper partnership.

FD: In 2015, the polling suggested it would be really close, probably a hung parliament, but then you got this unexpected majority. It’s a truism that campaigns matter when the result is close, and immediate post-election analysis seemed to be that you’d pumped a million quids worth of Facebook ads into (then coalition partner) Liberal Democrat-held seats, perhaps in a way that they weren’t expecting, and didn’t counter. Is that right? Did Facebook ads win you the election?

CE: We’re far enough away from it now that I don’t need to give credit one way or the other to digital. We were given a lot of credit, and I’m grateful to that, but the effort you describe is something I’d attribute to the entire campaign, which was ruthlessly targeted on the places that would decide the election. We had 40 seats we wanted to hold, and 40 we wanted to win. 80 seats in total. The list would change a bit over time, expand and contract, and many of them were actually Labour/Tory marginals. But yes, the Liberal Democrat seats in the south west opened up more as the election went on, and the narrative around the SNP really hurt Labour and the Lib Dems too, in the sense that people didn’t want another coalition, or Nicola Sturgeon and Alex Salmond having too big a role in Westminster politics. So although the targeting and ads got a lot of credit, it also just seemed that people knew the only way to stop it happening was to have a single party government, and that meant voting for David Cameron as PM.

FD: Let’s talk about 2024. Imagine you got the call, and were invited back into the fold. The polls look pretty bad, so your starting point would appear to be very different to anything you’ve faced before. What would you do?

CE: Rishi Sunak has attributes that you can definitely work with. He seems like a serious guy, and when you look back over his record you’ll see he’s achieved some things - fixing stuff broken by previous administrations and so on. His personal numbers are ok, and in terms of the numbers of people who prefer him as PM, there’s a job that can be done. Overall, I think there’s still a path to the Tories being the largest party in a hung parliament and doing a deal that ends up with him as Prime Minister.

In my view, the right approach is to look back at the way we fought 2015 and be as focused as possible on a single narrative. This might look hard in 2023, with inflation numbers so stubbornly high and so on, but in a year, Sunak could have more of a platform to stand on - something like “we’ve been through a lot, we have suffered, but we’re starting to see what recovery looks like, so let me finish the job”. You then need to couple that to ruthless targeting of marginal seats and it could end up with a hard won victory, or at least with Sunak as the only realistic PM. On the other hand it could obviously also go the other way, where voters tell him “come on, you’ve been in power for a long time now. We’ve had enough.”

FD: What do you think would have an impact?

CE: Preparation. Our plan for 2015 was starting to form by the back end of 2013, and was being executed pretty much in full throughout 2014. If the Tories aren’t doing this sort of work by now, it might be too late. As Lynton Crosby would tell us, “you can’t fatten a pig on market day”. 2017 was very different, we were brought on really late in the day. I took a (very unexpected) call while standing in a queue in a fish and chip shop in Aberdeenshire, where I was told there would be an election really soon and did we want to be involved. That massively compressed timeline meant we had a few weeks to do what we had two years to work on last time. That made things very much harder.

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FD: Many of the things you did in 2015 no longer necessarily exist in the same way do they? We spoke to Teddy Goff a few months ago (2012 Obama Director of Digital), who thinks that in the US, TikTok is the most important thing of all, and that there’s a sort of information war that needs to be fought there. But UK politics doesn’t feel quite as polarised as that does it?

CE: We do have to accept that the platforms really have changed. In my agency work now, fewer of the brands we work with care much about what’s happening on Facebook. So yes, there’s more interest in TikTok. I’ve got mixed feelings about the concept of ‘influencers’, but on platforms like that they are important to a degree. I suspect their importance plays into Labour’s hands, as does the fact that Instagram is probably more dominant than Facebook itself. But ultimately the question has to be “do you really get your audience?”, and working out how to find those people where they are.

FD: British politicians are nowhere on these platforms though? Very few of them seem able to make videos of any quality or authenticity? Neither Sunak nor Starmer has the ease on camera of someone like Obama. With TikTok, you’re getting, at most, a few seconds of someone’s time with a video and because you can’t buy ads there, it’s not possible to get the sort of reach you might get elsewhere? It feels like it could cost campaigns a lot of time and money, and at the end of a week’s campaigning, you might well feel like you got nowhere?

CE: It is a much more difficult environment. The Tories are going to have to find a way to be super focused, hope that the position turns in their favour and get their message across.

FD: Similarly, there’s a persistent idea that many things have moved to local groups and messaging. That seems like one way of reaching people in a targeted away, but is anyone actually able to do it credibly? Can you avoid it all turning into a massive political fight in the comments section? It seems to be a real challenge to do genuine grassroots engagement - most parties still want that top down control and they won’t take the risk of letting go?

CE: There are individual MPs who are good at it and instinctively understand it, but they’re very much in the minority. If you’d caught me back in 2011 or so, I was a proper social media utopian. I really thought the system of party politics was going to be smashed and we’d have genuine local champions discussing real issues. What an idiot eh? The parties have never been stronger. I still think it’s having a profound effect, but I’m just not sure what it actually is. If you think back to Clay Shirky and “Here Comes Everybody”, I’m not sure I internalised the “everybody” part. I assumed it was the good people, who wanted debates on real issues held in good faith, and we’d get this wave of splendid democracy where we would all focus on doing good things. But obviously the hate and bile came, and it drove away the reasonable people who don’t want to spend their time engaging in that sort of thing.

FD: We’re still a long way from platforms having control of that, or even seeming to care much about the quality of what they carry. In fact, they seem to be shrinking back from any responsibility to some extent. One of the successes of Who Targets Me has been this idea of transparency, and ad libraries - things that didn’t exist when we started in 2017. It’s allowed us to better ‘read’ what political campaigns are trying to do, in near-to-real time. Given that it would likely have spotted your target seats and messages in 2015, does that type of transparency worry you?

CE: I’m completely comfortable with it. We always ran our campaign on the basis that any of it could be on the front page of The Guardian tomorrow. It’s another thing Lynton (Crosby) should get credit for, the fact that things can leak, so they should be done right.

FD: You can see Labour trying to position itself to have that level of control again too, by setting up a very ‘97 type of operation, both in terms of people, but also trying to be very message disciplined and planned in their comms.

CE: The big change is that everyone has a direct line to the media. A modern Alastair Campbell would be going mad every day, because of who tweeted what, who said this and that.

FD: He’s very active on Twitter himself now, and doesn’t always exemplify the type of control he might expect of others.

This conversation leaves us feeling that things are really very chaotic out there. Perhaps there’s no obviously “right” digital campaign strategy for UK parties at the moment? Maybe, like in 2015 or 2019, we’ll just have to wait until someone wins to find out what it was?

Craig, we really appreciate you taking the time to talk. It was really fascinating.

CE: Thanks for having me.

We’ll see you next time, for that by-election update. Please remember to install our browser extension if you haven’t done so already. It helps track and explain what’s going on with digital ads at a much more granular level than the data provided by Meta allows for.

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Thanks for reading! See you next week!

Team Full Disclosure at Who Targets Me

We went into this conversation with Andrew Gray, who’s running as an independent in next week’s Selby and Ainsty by-election, worried that the “ethical AI” aspect of his pitch to voters was a gimmick, a way to try and cut through the campaign noise and create for himself a little fame. (In the spirit of full disclosure, we wouldn’t have paid him any notice if he hadn’t raised the spectre of “AI”, and other media coverage for him suggests that it’s worked.)

But in speaking with him, you find that Andrew’s not a Lord Buckethead-type novelty candidate at all. And although the involvement of AI in what he’s doing is lighter than his campaign materials might have you believe (he’s certainly not taking commands directly from ChatGPT), he’s serious about the idea that the deliberative tools he’s using in his campaign could fix the way we do parliamentary democracy.

In doing that, his campaign highlights some of the thorny challenges of what it means to be an MP - am I a delegate, in Parliament to use my best judgement on behalf of my constituents or; am I a representative, there to reflect what they think and want? Which of those do people really want? And, if they vote for an independent to make a point about the wider system, are they happy to forgo their ability to influence national politics?

A decade ago, someone like Andrew might chosen to be a ‘social media powered candidate’, running lots of town halls, Q&As and live streams and trying to use the conversations in those to steer their path forward. But today that seems completely dead as an idea. The lack of any real two-way engagement with and by MPs on social media platforms seems like strong evidence of that. As a result, many campaigns look very traditional again, very late-90s, wanting to broadcast their tightly controlled message and not listen to anything that comes back. Can campaigns like Andrew Gray’s re-open that idea of a direct, digital-enabled conversation with voters?

This conversation was captured with and transcribed by Otter.AI, then lightly edited for content and clarity.

Full Disclosure: Hi Andrew. Thanks for agreeing to chat at a very busy time for you. Now, Who Targets Me is interested in and works on the role of technology in democracy and political campaigns. Your website describes you as an “ethical AI powered candidate”. What’s the role of AI in your campaign?

Andrew Gray: I'm using an AI-slash-machine learning tool called Pol.is, which was created in Seattle about 10 years ago by the Computational Democracy Project. It’s a tool where people can submit and vote on ideas. I came across it two and a half years ago thanks to a tech friend of mine. During covid we were looking at how polarised everything was, but also seeing how everything seemed to be going so fast technologically, while our elections and politics seemed so antiquated. We saw how it was being used in Taiwan by Audrey Tang, where it’s taken off really well, but it hasn’t really happened anywhere else.

So I picked up an instance of it, and started a nonprofit called Consensus Politics, which I set up on my birthday and gave to myself as a kind of birthday present, and I’ve been using it for the last two and a half years. During that period my health has been pretty ropey - I have a chronic condition - so I had to slow down a bit, sell my law firm and work part-time, but I’ve tried to use that time and money to see if I can make the world a better place.

FD: What have you been doing with it?

AG: We’ve been using it in Harrogate, where we’re trying to build consensus around things that aren’t really party political, such as road safety. We’ve used it in Wandsworth, and in Kensington and Chelsea to find out people’s positions and ideas and to give them a vote on it. In Wandsworth, we had 56,000 votes about ways to get cleaner air, with the average person voting 98 times, so there has been some success.

In my campaign, I want to use this approach to say to people in Selby, can we come up with good ideas together? I have no policies, will you create them for me? Let’s create places where we can agree. Wouldn’t that be refreshing? Being an MP who actually has to listen and evolve over time?

If you look at what’s going on now, the Conservatives here in Selby and Ainsty are running on their 2019 manifesto. That was pre-Brexit, pre-Covid, pre-Ukraine, pre-inflation. But that manifesto was never contractual, and it really makes no sense at all now. The world has changed, but we seem stuck with it. I get why most people think the system seems broken.

So my idea is to use AI to find a consensus, make it transparent, so people can see all the data and what the results are - everyone gets the same information as me - and whether I win or lose, everybody can share those results and learn something interesting and useful from them.

FD: What do you think of the results so far?

AG: 3,000 votes have come in so far, and they’ve generally been incredibly progressive. People are trans- and gay- friendly, they don’t want capital punishment, they want to rejoin the EU. So, as a result, I’ll be the one candidate definitely saying “vote for me to rejoin the EU”.

FD: You’ve chosen to use the word AI, which is a hot button kind of term, and conjures up various images about computers doing the work for you. But the main use is to power this deliberative platform. Are you using AI in any other ways? Or is everything else human made?

AG: There’s a section on the website titled “What is politics?” that I’d written previously on ways of using crowd sourced wisdom in politics. But I write like a lawyer, and lawyers write in a boring way. For a campaign it needs to be more exciting than that. I could have hired a writer, but I’m on a shoestring, so I got ChatGPT to enhance the readability. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that - in fact, I think making things readable for the audience is ethical, and here the AI is helping me do something I can’t do myself. So yes, I am using a little AI for that reason.

But for the policy platform stuff, no, that’s human moderated, and done by me. Ideally there would be someone independent doing it, but the by-election just came along and I hadn’t time to organise that.

FD: Nothing else - no image generation or data mining or anything?

AG: I’m using an agency to help me with the website, but I don’t think they’re using any for graphics or anything like that.

FD: There’s a lot of concern about the use of generative AI - images in particular - by political campaigns to spread disinformation about opponents. Some of that is hype, some of that is real, some is already happening. Most of it though is still in the future, and what to do about it seems like a question worth asking you about?

AG: I think we need regulation and clarity. Our constitution just isn’t fast enough. As a lawyer, I was very dubious about the legality of Brexit. I was in favour of the referendum as a process, but with the vote being so tight, any elements of unlawfulness potentially rendered it illegal, and the lawyer in me didn’t like that. If I don't get involved in ethical AI, particularly in a political sense, someone's going to do it in a nefarious way. And so I feel like a torchbearer for trying to do it properly. But I’m open to criticism, about how to do it better.

FD: To put a lines of criticism to you - you’re putting a lot of weight on the capabilities of Pol.is, and there are always questions about equity and access to technology, who you’re reaching, who is able to speak and therefore who you’re listening to. It’s a combination of access and self-selection, and whether you’re representing the constituency, or just the constituents who are able to and want to engage with something like this, or perhaps whether in fact the system is being gamed in some way, particularly because all comments are anonymous?

AG: If you go to my website, you’ll see the five reasons not to vote for me. I’m not sure I’ve seen that in an election before. I’m trying to be as transparent as I can be - everything I’ve ever written is up there, my tax returns are up there. You can get a warts and all view of who I am.

So yes, questions about methodology are part of that. To participate, you need to be comfortable making your views known online. It’s anonymous, and people can say what they want, with freedom.

But to defend the approach, the constituency is massive. It’s 25 miles across, there’s Selby, which was a mining town, and loads of small villages. My health, and the timeframe of the campaign, makes it hard for me to drive an hour and a half to the other end of the constituency to a village with a hundred people in it.

I’d also say - and I’ve been part of all of the other parties in one form or another - knocking on doors is awful. I’ll run stalls, I’ll stand on a soapbox or platform, but I think door knocking is an invasion of privacy. It’s an incredibly rude thing to do. We put people in the invidious position of having to lie on the doorstep with their kids behind them, asking them who they will and won’t vote for.

So yes, the system has flaws, but at least I have to listen. I’m not going to be dictated to by the people at the whip’s office into voting against the interests of my constituents. The way I’m doing it the voters don’t need to have an amazing overall vision, it doesn’t matter if you’re English isn’t amazing - you can have a go and the only thing that’ll matter is the quality of your ideas.

FD: In our system politicians are sometimes representatives, and sometimes they’re delegates, where voters have to trust them, asking them to do what’s right and use their judgment. There’s a recent ad by one of your opponents - Claire Holmes - the Tory candidate. In the ad she talks about extra police in the area, then asks viewers “What would you like us to do with them? More community police? More drug busts?”. Doesn’t a lot of this deliberative stuff only work when you’re really forced to explore the trade offs? Won’t most people just say yes to all options? How do you deal with that?

AG: I’ve not actually seen the ads, but… well, I’m not sure it’s up to her, after all we have Police and Crime Commissioners for that, but… if I was elected yes, I would have to work and vote on issues that are incredibly complicated. How could I seek the consent or consensus of people? The best answer I’ve got is to use an analogy from lawyering. I’ve been a lawyer for 18 years, we have a code of ethics that means we have a very simple relationship with our clients. The client has a problem, you are an expert in a particular area, you set out the options and the costs, the client chooses one and the lawyer goes off and does it. It’s only at key moments - finalising a divorce, settling a case, where the lawyer goes back to the client. There’s latitude. The client can see their whole file, and I have to be transparent at all times, but we’re given the space to go and do our work. It would be the same here - I’d report back on my work, explain my decisions, show how the data drove a particular decision. In the crazy world where I do get elected, I might ask people to watch videos or read articles before they can vote in Pol.is.

If we’d done something like Pol.is before Brexit, the result might still have been 52-48, but I think we would have better understood that it was going to happen. I knew lots of people who couldn’t stand the EU. After the vote, many people were shocked, as if they didn’t understand their own country. If we’d used something like Pol.is, it wouldn’t have been a surprise at all.

FD: Is it enjoyable doing this? Is the exercise worth your time? It’d be very rare for an independent to win… so what’s your goal? What do you want to get out of it?

AG: I’m a Quaker, and at meetings, you only speak when you feel moved to. I’ve been going to meetings for 15 years, and have only felt moved to speak once, about the death of a friend in a road accident. And… sorry, excuse me… it always moves me when I speak about it. But… that’s how I felt with this. As if I had no choice. Who else has been an activist in the Conservative Party, chaired their local Labour Party and been involved in the Liberal Democrats? Who else has some time and enough resources to have a go at it? And Selby is the next constituency to where I live…

I did a poll in Harrogate about 20mph speed limits to protect children from death and injury on our roads. We found a consensus that people wanted limits outside of schools. We did this 18 months ago, got 14,000 votes, and yet the politicians in Harrogate haven’t done it. The level of governance and stupidity and the turgid nature of how slow things go in local government offends me on the deepest level. Children are getting injured - they could be mine. So, I felt I had no choice.

Am I enjoying it? No. I can’t stand social media, the comments, the unpleasantness. But that’s not actually what we’re like in Yorkshire, we get along with our neighbours, we look after their dogs and cats, even if they think completely different things. So we need to stop pretending we’re all against each other when we’re not.

Can I win? William Hill has me at 50/1. Polls show the independent down in Mid Bedfordshire running in third place. The Tories are vastly unpopular, but Labour are too, so no, I don’t think it’s impossible to win. It would be the greatest miracle of my life, but I really don’t think it’s impossible.

For transparency’s sake, it wouldn’t be one of our newsletters if we didn’t analyse some ads, so let’s take a look at Andrew Gray’s. He’s spent £517 on Meta ads in the last 30 days, targeting Tadcaster and Selby, which make up about 1/3 of the constituency’s 77,000 electorate.

This ad is probably his best bit of messaging, highlighting the fact that politics isn’t just in Westminster, it can be right there in the constituency too.

There are a few technical issues around the ad - it tries to get people to like his Facebook page, which seems like a mistaken use of resources (better to get people to visit his website and vote) and the use of hashtags on Facebook feels like it’s unlikely to drive any relevant discovery of his campaign, but it’s nicely designed. Overall, the quality is a lot higher than a lot of independent campaigns manage.

The Tory candidate, Claire Holmes, who has spent £900 on Meta ads in the last month, is running a few ads featuring vox pops from voters (supporters? party members? friends? it’s hard to say, as they aren’t credited). The one policy mentioned in the ad text is “working with Rishi Sunak to stop the boats”, which sits oddly next to an ad about “Labour only being focused on the south east”.

Keir Mather, the Labour candidate, is by far the biggest spender, with £3,600 of recent Meta ads. He’s targeting a lot of local postcodes, and using Lookalike Audiences to try and reach more potential Labour voters. With a week to go, his campaign has moved into voter turnout mode. With such a large majority to overcome Labour, though seemingly confident about picking up the seat, needs all the votes it can get.

Some other bits:

• We wrote about how Google’s political ad transparency tools and policies are a failure.

• With Fabio Votta, we’ve put together a new dashboard for the US presidential candidates ads, showing how they’re using a variety of targeting methods.

• We also wrote a Twitter thread on that.

• Speaking of threads, we joined Threads. Follow us there if you’re there.

• We also joined Bluesky, if you’re there. We’ll do our best to keep across these, as well as the wider topic of social media’s fragmentation!

Until next time,

Team Full Disclosure

The first part is an interview with Shaun Roberts, who ran election campaigns for the Liberal Democrats. The second part is a summary of the ads and data we’ve picked up around the four forthcoming by elections.

As usual, if you’re not a subscriber, please do sign up. If you are, and you like what we do, please consider taking out a paid sub and supporting Who Targets Me’s work.

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Today’s interview is with Shaun Roberts, who was Director of Campaigns for the Liberal Democrats between 2017 and 2019. He was elected as a councillor in his hometown of Leighton Buzzard this May. We spoke last week.

Full Disclosure: Hi Shaun - thanks for taking the time to chat. 

As we speak, there are four by-elections coming up and two of them seem very winnable for the Liberal Democrats. There are big majorities to overturn but they're very much of the kind that has been won by the party in the past.

Specifically, in your patch, for (the still-not-actually-called) by-election for Mid-Bedfordshire, if you were Director of Campaigns today, what would your plan be to win the seat?

Shaun Roberts: Mid-Bedfordshire will vote for a non-Tory, that is very, very clear. And as far as the Liberal Democrats are concerned, the best chance is to establish yourself as the non-Tory, the main challenger. To do that you need to get to as many doorsteps as you can, you need to get leaflets through doors, you need to get into those social media feeds, so people asking themselves “Who can beat the Conservatives here?” understand that the answer is the Liberal Democrats. 

This is a battle the party has to go through in almost every election, because the default for most people is, is it Labour or is it Conservative? If you’re the Liberal Democrat, you have to force yourself into that argument. 

But it’s worked plenty of times before. We finished third in Mid-Bedfordshire last time, but we also finished third in Tiverton and Honiton, which we won, we were third in North Shropshire, which we also won, so it’s not really about what happened at the last election. 

Instead, it's about showing who's got the biggest capacity to get the most votes in the coming election, and in these more rural constituencies that’s not Labour because there are so many Tories who physically will never, ever vote for them. We just have to make sure we avoid a situation where Labour and the Lib Dems get 30% each, leaving 40% to the Tories. To me, that’s their one chance of winning this time.

FD: Some of that job gets done for you, right? People will pre- assign these narratives to these by-elections early on, then the parties adjust strategy accordingly. Labour gets Uxbridge and Selby and Ainsty, you get Mid-Bedfordshire and Somerton and Frome. 

SR: Yes, but all parties are tribal, and there are people in all of them who think that, no matter what, you fight to win. When they do that, they aren’t thinking about the bigger picture, which means some form of tactical voting is something of a necessity. No one likes it, but it’s a reality.

We won Eastleigh in 2013 with about 35% of the vote because UKIP got 30% and so did the Tories. On that occasion, it was a good thing there were basically two conservative parties running against us. So it works both ways, but it still sucks. Those of us who are progressive, and tend by our nature to be more idealistic, really struggle with it because you’re operating in a system that’s anything other than ideal.

FD: Let’s head back to Mid-Bedfordshire. You're sat in your giant chair at your huge walnut desk in Lib Dem HQ. You have resources at your disposal - the hundred grand you get to run a by-election campaign, a certain number of days and weeks ahead, activists who will give their time. What do you choose to do? How do you divide up that budget?

SR: With the Liberal Democrats historically, digital gets a low share - our campaigning has been overwhelmingly paper-based, to the tune of about 90% of our spending. 

I recently got elected in my hometown. We ran some Facebook ads for the election, but actually as an individual it was a pain, because you just end up with lots of negative comments, which you have to deal with.

For me, the presence on the doorstep was the most effective thing. Ultimately, all political campaigns want to interrupt people’s lives to get them to pay attention. In the end, nothing is more interruptive than a person arriving at your door, so that's the first priority. The second is a bit of paper arriving on your doormat. For me, Facebook, or social media in general, is still behind that.

FC: To win a council seat you needed 1000-1500 votes? At that scale, you can knock on every door.

SR: Yes. But also, the lower the turnout of an election, the more effective in-person campaigning is. Some pretty long-established studies show that, in low turnout elections, if somebody is visited by the candidate, the chances of them voting shoot up.

FD: But what happens when the electorate is 100,000 people? When you can’t scale it up to knocking on every door?

SR: That’s where, at least for by-elections, our volunteers come in. And again, because by-elections have lower turnout - usually 50% or less - but a lot of attention, you can reach a lot of people, even in a short period. 

For me the experience of door knocking is just better. When I look at the same sort of “debate” you get with social media my observation from doing it myself, in the big Facebook Group in the town, is that the conversation that happens there is very confrontational. People have simply lost the ability to disagree with each other politely. So you can’t just wade into these groups. You need to be careful. They’ve replaced the local paper, but they’re not the same. They feel riskier, so that’s why I think there’s some comfort in traditional campaigning methods, because they don’t change.

As for online advertising, it’s just difficult to get good data for by-elections, because there’s simply no run-up. But Mid-Bedfordshire hasn’t been hard fought for a long time. Even the local Conservatives probably don’t know that much about the electorate. So you’re just building from scratch, trying to identify audiences, get people to take surveys, learn about what people think.   Because the constituency hasn’t been competitive, voters are going to be challenged - they’re going to see new information, coming into their house, onto their screen. 

FD: What will that challenge look like? In any campaign, there’s a mixture of positivity and negativity. You talked about your “define ourselves as the realistic challengers here” strategy. But at some point, the Tories will pick their candidate, but they've also got Dorries and Boris Johnson in the background, Rishi Sunak too, as well as all the issues people care about at the moment. It seems like there are lots of options about what to go with?

SR: I think it's different to what it would ordinarily be. People have decided the Conservatives are useless. That’s actually rare. Normally in a by-election, you think, okay, “how do I make a case for change in this area?” But today the voters are already there. They're pre-cooked. You don’t even need to be negative. Just about everyone knows that nothing works in this country right now. People are angry and resigned. So I think people need more positivity, they need more hope. I think we’ll run a campaign to remind people the Conservatives are responsible for the mess we're in, but that also says “we can change this, we can make a difference”. 

There’s just no point in leaving people sitting at home thinking “it’s all terrible.”

FD: Going back to thinking about data…what might you have at the beginning of a campaign like this and what might you be able to get a hold of? Or are you just going in blind and knocking on as many doors as you can to start finding out who your voters are? 

SR: Well, we’ll know who voted at the local elections because we get access to the marked register. For a by-election, that’s enormously powerful, because people who vote in locals generally also vote in by-elections. That’s your starting point. We’ll also know about postal voters, who are very likely to vote in by-elections as well. This data is very helpful for door-knocking and direct mail.

But for social media advertising, we don’t have those resources. There, it’s going to be mostly geographical targeting, going after specific postcode segments. We used to have better data, but GDPR has meant we’re not using things like Experian Mosaic data any more, which used to give us demographic and socio-economic data for a postcode. 

Overall, the level of sophistication you might see in a general election isn’t happening in a by-election. There’s just not that level of data. 

And it’s part of a wider pattern. It’s actually become harder to work out who’s going to vote for you. 20 years ago, we would literally drive around an area, and we'd mark a street with a red pen or a blue pen or highlighter, and say, “that's a posh area, that might be Tory, that's a really scruffy area, that might be Labour”. But it’s all mixed up now. Where I am, the estates are all mixed, two bedroom and four bedroom houses. You can no longer say “that’s a Labour street” and a big house is no longer necessarily a Tory voter. 

So the patterns just aren’t easy to spot. During the local elections, I’d expect older people to raise certain issues - immigration, small boats. They did, but they were also really, really unhappy with the Conservatives. Lots of the cues you might have expected to work no longer do. The strong ties to political parties seem to be going away. 

It’s the same with the under 50s, and younger people or people with families - the conversations I was having, I just found no strong tie to any political party at all. Going forward, I think the number of undecided voters is going to be huge, and many of them will be people that voted Tory in 2019. 

And so that that's going to be the battle.

WTM: Thanks for taking the time Shaun!

Ads by-the-by-election campaigns

Let’s take a look at the digital ads being run by the parties and candidates in the four by-elections taking place in July (Mid-Beds is still tbd).

Overall, it’s notable that each campaign has its own subtleties - either in the way that candidates are being pushed forward or hidden from view, how much effort each party is putting in, and which groups of voters each thinks they need to win over.

Let’s go through them one by one.

Uxbridge (Con maj: 7,210)

Danny Beales (Labour, £1,130 spent in the last month)

Labour is running a two-pronged ad campaign, through Danny Beales (the candidate) and the London Labour accounts.

The candidate’s ads are focused on local issues, and his own biography as someone living in the constituency. It’s worth noting that all Beales’ ads are using an uploaded list to reach voters, likely either the local party membership list, or data the party has gathered during canvassing.

The London Labour ads (£1,184 spent in the last month) are mostly similar, but they are running a small number of attack ads (a pretty common tactic - don’t let your candidate get their hands dirty).

The Tories are in attack mode, going after London Mayor Sadiq Khan for ULEZ expansion and the potential closure of the Uxbridge Police Station (which Labour’s Beales also opposes). Unfortunately, it’s not straightforward to isolate the Uxbridge spending from the rest of the party’s activity (over £18,000 spent in the last month).

The local party, Hillingdon Conservatives, has also spent £1,300 on ULEZ-related ads in the last 30 days. The Tory candidate, Steve Tuckwell, hasn’t made an appearance in paid ads yet (he’s not very active on Facebook).

Somerton and Frome (Con maj: 19,213)

Sarah Dyke (Lib Dem)

The Liberal Democrat candidate, Sarah Dyke, has been running her campaign via the local party page, running ads looking for campaign volunteers:

As Shaun Roberts suggested in our interview above, the party a by-the-book campaign, using a classic Lib Dem bar chart and “only we can win here” messaging. By recruiting volunteers, they’re clearly looking to turn online interest in defeating the Tories, into volunteers who can knock doors and deliver leaflets. The Tories have had a big majority in the seat since 2015, so the LDs will be looking to use this election to rebuild its cadre of local activists.

Faye Purbrick (Conservative)

Like in Uxbridge, the Conservative candidate isn’t running any ads via her own page. The party’s ad campaign is focused on a petition to support the opening of a new station in the constituency, along with a small number of ads on police numbers.

The train ad seems particularly smart - who doesn’t want a new train station near them? It’s possible the party is gathering some useful contact data from voters through this ad.

Selby and Ainsty (Con maj: 20,137)

Keir Mather (Labour, £353 spent so far)

In Yorkshire, Labour’s strategy is very different to the Lib Dem approach in Somerton and Frome. Instead of trying to persuade non-Tory voters to choose a party to beat the Tories (there simply aren’t enough of those in the constituency to form a coalition that can win the seat), Labour has to try and persuade people to switch AND get their own vote out. It’s a much more difficult thing to do. Hence ads like the video below:

The Conservative candidate, Claire Holmes, hasn’t run any ads of her own yet, but the party has, again on policing.

Mid-Bedfordshire (Con maj: 24,664)

You’d think that the campaign in Mid Beds wouldn’t be live yet, as Nadine Dorries hasn’t officially resigned and there’s no date for the election. But you’d be wrong, as all parties have selected a candidate and are getting into the swing of things, despite the lack of a confirmed election date.

Festus Akinbusoye (Conservative)

Again, nothing here directly from the candidate but, alongside further police numbers ads, the Conservatives are running messages on protecting the green belt.

Including a variant that attacks Labour (and there’s a Lib Dems version too):

Emma Holland-Lindsay (Lib Dem)

The Lib Dems are running more “only we can win here” ads:

Alistair Strathern (Labour)

And perhaps worryingly for Lib Dem chances, Labour are active in the constituency, with their candidate running a small (£102 spent in the last month) effort so far.

That’s it for now - in our next issue, we’ll be taking a closer look at the blue side of things. The Tories have really upped their advertising effort since Rishi Sunak came to power, and though their polling position is bad, we’ve already spent some time talking to people with a lot of hands-on experience of getting them elected.

More next time.

Team Full Disclosure @ Who Targets Me

A minority of ads use postcode targeting, but when it is used, it can reveal a page’s geographical electoral strategy. From it, we should be able to see exactly the areas the parties are trying to reach, the seats they’re targeting and the amount they’re spending on each.

In principle this sounds like an easy problem to solve (looking up a constituency from a postcode is a long solved problem) but in practice, things are a little more difficult.

The first challenge is that Meta’s Ad Library provides only the postcode sector (i.e. the last two letters of a standard AA11 1AA postcode are stripped off). Meta doesn’t offer a constituency- or ward- level targeting option, so political advertisers use a list of these sectors to build up a ‘map’ of the area(s) they want to reach with their ads.

For example, the constituency of Bournemouth West has 4,206 full postcodes (e.g. BH1 1AJ), spread across 40 postcode sectors (e.g. BH1 1). Some advertisers try and target all the postcode sectors in a constituency, while others focus on just the sectors most likely to have ‘their’ voters (e.g. Labour might target the urban ones, the Conservatives might focus on the rural ones).

Once you know the postcode sectors being targeted by an advertiser, you then need to match them to constituencies. Unfortunately, many postcode sectors overlap constituency boundaries, meaning a single sector can give you more than one constituency result. 

For example, in the week to the 23rd of June, Labour targeted 2,329 postcode sectors. These matched at least one postcode sector in 299 different seats (of the 534 total Parliamentary seats in England*). 

Of those 299 seats, 215 are Tory-held, 81 are Labour-held, one is a Liberal Democrat seat and one is held by Lindsay Hoyle, the speaker.

But what does that mean? Are Labour actually targeting 215 Tory-held seats? If that’s the case, they’re either very confident of a massive landslide or campaigning in a very inefficient way, by targeting places they have no chance of winning.

We don’t think either of those is quite right. Not at the moment at least. Let’s return to the postcode sectors to see if we can learn anything from them.

In 55 of the 299 seats, we find that Labour only targeted a single postcode sector. 34 of them are currently Tory-held**. On average, the seats have a Conservative majority of 17,200, which likely puts them beyond Labour’s reaches, even with current polling being so positive for the party. 

But when we look at those postcode sectors more closely, we find they all overlap or border a seat that Labour would have a good chance of winning.

For example, Labour has been targeting the DN37 0 postcode sector. It’s in the seat of Cleethorpes, currently held by Tory MP Martin Vickers. He has a majority of 21,418, which makes his the 78th safest Tory seat in the country. But DN37 0 also covers the borders of the Great Grimsby constituency, where Lia Nici’s majority is just 7,331 (making her seat a definite Labour target).

Continuing this line of analysis, we found 24 seats where Labour has targeted two postcode segments. In these, the average Tory majority is around 21,500. But again, looking more closely, we find that these postcode segments also neighbour or overlap with winnable seats.

In fact, when we plot the number of postcode segments targeted by Labour in a constituency against the size of the average Tory majority for each seat, we can see a pattern emerge. Once Labour is targeting at least 6-8 postcode segments in a constituency, based on current polling, the seats cross the threshold into winnable territory based on current polls (i.e. have Tory majorities less than 15,000). 

If we take the list of seats where the number of targeted postcode segments >= 6, we get a list of 118 seats (and their majorities).

This looks like a pretty good list (albeit with a few ‘large majority’ outliers). If Labour wins these seats, they’re well into comfortable majority territory. (Remember - this data doesn’t include Scotland, where polling says Labour might take half of the SNP’s seats or Wales, where surveys suggest Labour would wipe the Tories out entirely.

What does this tell us? Well, it shows us that Labour is currently spending money well beyond the winning line, likely to the tune of around 50 seats.

But is that anything new? After all, it’s easy to produce a list of target seats for any party (just list the seats in which they came second, ordered by increasing majority).

But by using this near realtime postcode data provided by the Meta Ad Library, we can start to see the actual constituencies being reached with ads and better understand which seats they actually hope to win.

Over the coming months we’ll repeat this analysis for the other parties to see if the handful of postcode sectors they’re targeting can whisper their electoral hopes and dreams to us.

—---------------

* Labour only targets English seats, with Welsh Labour and Scottish Labour responsible for their own advertising (neither is currently very active).

** This analysis is based on current constituency boundaries. We’ll start using the new boundaries soon. 

Should we even have to do this?

The political ad transparency voluntarily offered by the platforms (there’s still no regulation actually up and running for any of this) allows us to do this type of analysis. It’s better than nothing, but it still takes a lot of work to make something of it.

We needed to copy and paste 2,000+ postcode sectors, get a friendly volunteer to write scripts to turn them into real postcodes and connect them to sites and APIs that return constituencies and MPs and majorities. Then we threw all that into a spreadsheet and fiddled with it until we got some numbers that told the story above.

Now, we don’t expect that a social media platform should have to do that for us but… does it have to be so much work?

Why can’t parties just target constituencies? That boundary data is widely and freely available. If Meta and Google offered it to advertisers, it would make it easier for ads to reach the people who can actually vote for a politician, as well as greater clarity about what parties are trying to achieve. Social media platforms promise “relevant” ads, but when it comes to politics, they make it hard to achieve that.

And for users, why can’t it be easier to see who is targeting your constituency? As it stands Meta only breaks ad data down into “England/Wales/Scotland/Northern Ireland”, which isn’t granular enough to account for our 650 seat system. Again, this means people like us having to write code, manipulate data and build software to make this stuff more comprehensible.

For years, we called for transparency around political ad targeting, and when we got it, we got this. With the platforms appearing to row back their staffing and commitments to electoral integrity, a lack of transparency feels like a missed opportunity.

Over the last fifteen years, advertising has played a role in achieving more political objectives than was previously possible.

It’s a significant reason why it’s felt like there’s been a revolution in the conduct of election campaigns. But I think we’ve now entered more of a steady state from a strategic perspective.

In modern election campaigns, it’s now standard practice to use ads to steer the media narrative, persuade floating voters in key seats, test messages, find supporters, raise money, encourage advocacy, register voters and get out the vote.

But some contextual factors mean the way parties will try to deliver against these objectives using advertising will be distinctive in the next election. Here’s how I think that might happen.

1. Running digital ads that don’t look like ads

Since the last election, the ad load on social networks has increased. When users are served more ads, their subconscious ad avoidance technique becomes more honed.

This means well-polished but creatively unremarkable ads are destined to be scrolled over or skipped.

To combat this, political parties will try different tactics to make their adverts look as if they’ve not been touched by the hands of marketing professionals.

For the 2019 election, the Conservatives deployed “boomer memes” to generate earned media, but this time around, we’ll see parties using deliberately lo-fi production values in paid media as a way of regularly making their paid content seem organic.

The USA is way ahead of the UK in using this tactic, but I’ve started to see some attempts by British parties, and I expect this trend to continue.

They will also try and cut through in your social feeds by using influencer marketing techniques. Influencers with big followings in important demographics will work with political parties to co-create and disseminate content.

With more people actively avoiding traditional news, parties won’t be able to rely on newspaper coverage or clips running on the evening news programmes to get their message across. Using paid influencers can help fill those gaps in reach while making the message feel like it’s editorial instead a paid ad.

For example, I can imagine an Instagrammer or TikToker who posts parenting content doing a video interview with a party on their early years childcare policy.

But more prevalent will be political parties’ attempts to get their activists to engage on WhatsApp group chats and community Facebook Groups. Creating election content that a group will welcome in a closed or semi-closed online environment is challenging. Still, it won’t stop parties attempting to deploy micro-influencer strategies in their highest priority seats.

2. It will pay to invest in targeting

In the 2019 general election, the Conservatives prioritised reaching as many voters as possible, sometimes at the expense of targeting. For example, they bought homepage takeovers on the Daily Mail and YouTube, which gets lots of eyeballs but reach a broad audience.

In electoral situations where there is an issue that resonates with a wide range of voters, prioritising reach over targeting (which adds expense) can be effective because you can communicate with potential supporters who may not fit into specific demographic or behavioural targeting criteria but are still likely to be interested in the issue.

As it stands, it doesn’t seem like one dominant issue will differentiate the parties, so it will pay to target groups of like-minded voters with tailored messages that are likely to resonate.

3. The base will get more attention

Brexit and Jeremy Corbyn had a significant impact on the base of both parties in the 2017 and 2019 general elections.

The primary beneficiary of this was the Conservatives; plenty of people were propelled to the polling booth either by a desire to get Brexit done or oppose Corbyn (or both).

But Corbyn’s message also inspired a hard core of support for Labour. And the salience of Brexit meant people who were firmly pro-EU would turn out to vote against the Conservatives.

Voters’ perception of high stakes and the desire to support their preferred side can lead to increased turnout. The 2017 and 2019 U.K. general elections, held in the aftermath of a divisive referendum, had the two highest turnouts since 1997.

Without a single issue that can be relied on to compel less committed citizens to cast a vote, and with Labour and the Conservatives having leaders who inspire less passion than in was the case in 2019, getting people to turnout will be more demanding and, therefore, more critical.

Parties will find issues that motivate their core supporters and use advertising to create a sense of urgency.

The Conservative Party’s attack line on Labour as “the party of protest” is designed to fire up their base. Given Starmer's coolheaded, process-driven persona, such an accusation seems left-field to the floating voter. Still, it delights Conservative partisans as it’s how they think Starmer is perceived.

4. There will be a battle for “Best Prime Minister”

Polling shows that Starmer has a slight lead over Sunak regarding who would be the best Prime Minister (though both have room to improve on measures like strength, trust and likeability).

Given the evidence that there is some degree of relationship between the approval of a party leader and the share of the vote that a party receives - and leadership approval is a metric that tends to fluctuate - both parties will see it as a battleground.

We haven’t seen a party go “toe to toe” on leadership for a while. The last time there was such an even matchup of leaders going into a general election was in 2010 when Labour was led by Gordon Brown and the Conservatives by David Cameron.

Parties will use advertising to convey a personal narrative for their leader and attempt to define their opponent in conventional ways. But I also expect them to try and develop a meme-able persona.

From Donald Trump dancing on stage to Joe Biden enjoying ice cream on the campaign trail, having aspects of a leader’s character which supporters can use to generate and share content is an increasingly crucial aspect of a modern election campaign.

5. Parties will need to do the basics brilliantly

So far, I’ve focused on contextual considerations for this election rather than creating a playbook.

Because advertising now plays such a fundamental role in a successful general election campaign, the sheer number of objectives advertising serves means that even doing brilliant basics takes a lot of work.

As a result, building solid foundations will need to be prioritised over developing a strong GIF game.

So, I tip my hat to the folks working on the campaigns. I’m excited to see what they come up with over the next year or so!

Thanks Benedict! (You can read and see more of his work at politicaladvertising.co.uk and on Instagram).

Our next issue will be on the strategic and tactical approaches to running ads for by-election campaign (you wait ages for one, then three show up at once, so it seems like a worthy topic).

Remember, you can install our browser extension to learn more about the ads you’re targeted with. It tracks thousands of UK political advertisers.

See you next time!

Team Full Disclosure