Yesterday, the UK Advertising Standards Authority’s CEO Guy Parker published a piece outlining some of the challenges of regulating political advertising in the UK (challenges which are also broadly applicable to other democracies). We agree that it’s difficult to regulate the content of political ads. That’s why we don’t think…

Tonight sees the first ever leaders climate change debate on Channel 4. It’s an unprecedented elevation in the status of the environment as a political issue in British elections and comes on the heels of some of the largest climate change protests the country has ever seen. Given this new…

We think we’ve got to the bottom of the appearance - and disappearance - of the Tory leader in the latest batch of Conservative ads. — We all know that Boris Johnson isn’t universally popular. The Conservative Party seems to appreciate this too. In a new batch of targeted Facebook ads the party uses him, and his opposing party leaders, in quite different ways. It’s not just a creative choice. …

Last week we wrote a story based on Snap’s latest political ad transparency data. The data was labelled inaccurately, so we drew the wrong conclusion from it. — Last week Snap released data about political ads that have run on its platform. The data was wrong. It contained a column (labelled “Targeting Geo — Postal Code”) that appeared to include postcode districts that were being targeted with an ad campaign. …

Important note: This story was based on some misleading data supplied by Snap as part of its political ad transparency work, which led us to draw an incorrect conclusion. We performed this analysis in good faith — had the data been correctly labelled, we would not have researched, written and published the piece. You can read about what happened here: Snap’s bad data and our bad reading of it Last week we wrote a story based on Snap’s latest political ad transparency data. The data was labelled inaccurately…medium.com

A 2019 General Election report by Tristan Hotham Vaporwave is a microgenre of electronic music and an Internet meme that emerged in the early 2010s. Vaporwave is musically based on ironic interpretations of chillwave alongside 1980s and 1990s mood music styles such as smooth jazz or elevator music. …

You may have seen elements of this report in this Observer/Guardian news piece and then also reported on the Andrew Marr show. The following article by Tristan Hotham, is a detailed report on A/B testing by the parties that those pieces were based upon. Political parties using Facebook ads have…

As the spectre of a UK General Election looms in the Autumn, some British political parties have been ramping up their Facebook ad campaigns. The Conservatives, in particular, have invested heavily in the past month, outspending their nearest opponent nearly 3:1. Between July 13th and August 11th, they spent £80,424…

Over 1000 Facebook ads have been launched by the Conservative Party — the majority targeting men over 45 — as part of a nationwide data-gathering exercise that was launched in the week since Boris Johnson became Prime Minister. Conservatives have spent over £23k in the past week promoting ads to…