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Not winning here, there or anywhere
The Tory paid digital campaign is losing to Labour in every possible way.
Later in the week we’ll compare the Lib Dems, Greens, SNP and Reform digital campaigns, but today we’ll be looking at how the Tory and Labour digital ads have shaped up (or not) over the last few weeks.
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.
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