Want to Help Politicians Get Elected? Focus on Facebook, Not TV Ads
It has up to 3,000 to 5,000 “data points” about 230 million adults in America, claims an English data firm used by Donald Trump in the election. That’s almost everyone. Cambridge Analytica uses the information to build psychological profiles it can use to sell products — or sell candidates.
Cambridge Analytica puts personality quizzes on Facebook that claim to find the user’s “ocean” score, the New York Times reports. The “ocean” score measures openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism — crucial information for targetting ads. The company worked for Ted Cruz in the primaries and Donald Trump in the general election.
The Trump Campaign’s “Dark Posts”
Trump’s campaign used the information for political direct marketing, directing not only ads but news stories to particular readers. Using a Facebook tool called “dark posts,” news stories that only targeted readers will see, the campaign directed “different ads to different potential voters, aiming to push the exact right buttons for the exact right people at the exact right times.”
“Imagine the full capability of this kind of ‘psychographic’ advertising,” writes Times writer McKensie Funk.
In future Republican campaigns, a pro-gun voter whose Ocean score ranks him high on neuroticism could see storm clouds and a threat: The Democrat wants to take his guns away. A separate pro-gun voter deemed agreeable and introverted might see an ad emphasizing tradition and community values, a father and son hunting together.
A Bloomberg story published two weeks before the election reported that the Trump campaign also used dark posts targeted at likely Clinton voters, especially “idealistic white liberals,” young women and blacks. These weren’t pro-Trump, but anti-Clinton. For example, the campaign created a South Park-style cartoon of Clinton’s famous remark about black “super predators,” using her own voice. The cartoon’s text read “Hillary Thinks African Americans are Super Predators.” It
will be delivered to certain African American voters through Facebook “dark posts”. … The aim is to depress Clinton’s vote total. “We know because we’ve modeled this,” says the official. “It will dramatically affect her ability to turn these people out.”
Smarter Than the Pros
The effectiveness of this kind of political advertising explains why the Trump campaign spent so little on “old media” like television ads, compared with the Clinton campaign’s spending.
Evidence is increasing that old-media ads, especially television ads, don’t really help candidates. One study reported by NPR found that in 2008, having 1,000 more ads than a competitor during the campaign produced only a 0.5 point increase in votes. Ads do the most good for a candidate in reaching the undecided, but are decreasingly good at that. “The number of persuadable voters is shrinking,” notes NPR, “as the number of moderates slowly but steadily declines and voters grow more polarized.”
At the end of the presidential campaign, Trump’s team was “spending $70 million a month, much of it to cultivate a universe of millions of fervent Trump supporters, many of them reached through Facebook,” according to Bloomberg.
These voters, whom Cambridge Analytica has categorized as “disenfranchised new Republicans,” are younger, more populist and rural — and also angry, active, and fiercely loyal to Trump. Capturing their loyalty was the campaign’s goal all along.
“We knew how valuable this would be from the outset,” says Brad Parscale, who directed Trump’s media campaign. “We own the future of the Republican Party.”
Perhaps that’s why, as Bloomberg writes, Trump’s team “thinks it’s smarter than political professionals.” They may be right. Published 12 days before the election, the Bloomberg story declared that “Trump is headed for a loss, possibly an epic one. His frustrated demeanor on the campaign trail suggests he knows it.”