The Impact of Facebook’s New Ad Requirements on Political Campaigns
Last Saturday Facebook announced a sweeping change to their requirements for advertisers in response to increased criticism over their handling of Russian Social Media ads. While the changes have been dreadfully under reported by the media, their result is gonna be a huge change to how Facebook advertisers, especially political ones, operate.
Increased Transparency
The most critical of these changes is the increased transparency for digital ads. Facebook announced that all ads being run by any page can now be seen by anyone visiting the page. They can only see the ads currently running, but for those ads they can see the creative, amount spent, and demographics of who they’re reaching. Previously, these ads weren’t findable unless you were targeted by them, or if you paid for specialized digital spy services like BigBigAds.com or AdsFox.com.
The impact on ALL advertisers is going to be huge for this. Political campaigns are an adversarial business, deciding what our opponents see and what they don’t is a critical part of the strategy of a campaign. But it’s also a critical part of the strategy of most businesses that have some form of competition. Now your competitors can see what deals you’re doing, how much you’re spending on digital advertising, and what you’re emphasizing to certain customers. The biggest issue I see coming up are going to be from advertisers who A/B test deals with different pricing for the same product to find what works the best. Now anyone can go to a page, view the current ads, and click through to get the best deal of the bunch, eliminating this powerful statistical analysis of your target customer.
Video from Facebook showing how the new disclosure will work:
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Of course, that scenario matters much less for political campaigns. For campaigns the biggest change will be for marketers that micro target certain demographics with messaging you wouldn’t want to have others see. No longer can you get away with targeting Republicans with how you’ll “defend the second amendment” while hoping your Democratic base won’t see it. Now anyone can view any of these ads, and you can believe that your most engaged supporters and your competitors will be watching, and will give you headaches for anything that could alienate voters. It’s also an easy story for the news, who can now on any slow news day flip through Facebook ads for people running and see if there’s anything that might sound good on the 6:00 news.
Full Disclosure
Political campaigns must now verify their identity with Facebook, which you can now find from the ad itself. For most above the board political campaigns this isn’t a problem, the goal of your advertising is to get your candidates name out there, so hiding that information would be counter intuitive. You are also required by law to put that information on the Facebook page with disclosure language, so firms following the law are already disclosing this information.
But this will help shine light on dark money political digital campaigns, such as Russia in the 2016 election. The question will be how well can Facebook identify these types of campaigns? Anyone who follows the shifting waters of campaign finance knows this can be trickier than it appears at face value. I’ll go into that in a later post, but for now this is a good step in the direction of getting some much needed sunshine on these ads.
These changes will be rolled out in the United States the summer of 2018. There’s still a lot of details of their announcement not fully flushed out which will make a BIG difference to the end result, but for now this is a good step in the right direction for a company that should have been more on top of this earlier.