Who's targeting May?
The window for an early election is closing. Do the parties' ads tell us whether it's likely to happen?
Hi.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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…
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.
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).
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.
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.
That’s it for this issue. Please:
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