Bargain Presidency: Using Psychological Profiles, Facebook Dark Posts, and Microtargeting to win a Presidential Election

It’s the end of November 2016 and the race for President of the United States is over...mostly. Donald Trump surprised just about everyone with his victory. Strategies for how he did it are still being discussed and will be for a long time. One thing is clear, though, it was about data not dollars.

In this article, we will highlight a few ways that the Trump campaign leveraged smart, targeted communications via Facebook to maximize effect and minimize cost. The best part? You can use the same tactics to boost your brand recognition and audience engagement.

Gathering Intelligence

Let’s start with the company that you have probably never heard of, but who just might know you better than you know yourself, Cambridge Analytica (CA). Trump’s campaign hired them to identify the specific people they should target. They build psychological profiles on people using social media.  Those fun Facebook quizzes you took and shared with your friends were probably part of the collection system they used to generate their profiles.

Per their web site “We collect up to 5,000 data points on over 220 million Americans, and use more than 100 data variables to model target audience groups and predict the behavior of like-minded people”

Focusing on people instead of mass appeal

In 1967, advertising executive Lester Wunderman coined the term “Direct Marketing,” which referred to targeting specific audience segments as opposed to blanketing your message to everyone. But back in the 1960’s we only had primitive tools (by today’s standards), such the A.C. Nielsen ratings system which gave us general knowledge about groups of people. This lack of specific data lead companies to create ads that attempted to appeal to mass audiences. Even using Nielsen demographics did not allow companies to achieve granularity beyond age, gender, location.

Retargeting

Tailoring an ad to an individual is the ultimate goal in advertising. In 2016, we have tools to do that. Individually tailored digital ads can be tested and matched to a person using specific rules via the Facebook ad system. Their detailed targeting lets you include or exclude people based on what Facebook knows about each person. 

When that data is not detailed enough, that is where the Facebook retargeting system can get even more fine-grained and how CA helped find the right people for Trump’s ads. This system works one of two ways, sites use a tracking pixel to know when you visited them (such as when you took a fun quiz) or by uploading email addresses (that you agreed to share when you took the quiz). CA compiles all of this information, matching your quiz results to your email or tracking pixel, to create what they call your Ocean Score:

CA uses this score to create the retargeting lists and build focused audiences. The next step is to create ad sets for each category that fit the individual's psychological profile. 

You can’t please everyone, unless you are using Facebook “Dark Posts”

Let’s face it, people like the same things but for different reasons and trying to target posts that appeal to each of those reasons fills your page with ads. No one wants to see that. This is where Facebook “Dark Posts” come in. If you do a regular targeted post, that post is sent to your target audience, but also shows up on your Facebook page for all to see. Dark Posts allow you to create posts that go out to your target audience, but do not appear on your Facebook page. 

This allows you to create ad sets with messages targeted to specific, relevant audiences that bring all of them back to your page. Dark Posts let you appeal to a wide array of audiences, each with specific reasons for visiting your page, without the others seeing every ad you used. The bottom line: Both end up at the same brand page, but for different reasons.

So where are the savings, the bargain, the results?

Digital marketing has always been interesting to me so naturally I was curious how much each candidate was spending on Facebook. The FEC requires that candidates publicly file their reports. When I looked at the data in August, I was confused. Trump was not spending as much on Facebook as Hillary Clinton. I thought maybe he was not doing it as a campaign expense, but that answer did not make much sense. Now that the election is over the details are emerging. Take a look at this article on ad exchanger for a more detailed explanation:

https://adexchanger.com/ad-exchange-news/trump-paid-media-strategy-focused-facebook/

Trump Did Have A Paid Media Strategy, And It Focused On Facebook

Basically, the Trump campaign did exactly what we’ve been discussing. They used targeted and Dark Posts on facebook to send specific messages to different audiences. By sending messages that recipients were likely to agree with, it raised the likelihood that said recipients would share the posts to others. Not only did that increase the reach of the post, but each engagement provided more data about more people

I’m not running for President, so how does this help me?

The concept is the same whether you are running for office or running a business. Our analysis shows that you can spend substantially less by targeting individual people than by sending a mass message that most people will ignore. Get to know your audience and understand how your business relates to the individuals that make up that audience. Then you can create tailored messages that will more effectively influence consumers. This micro targeting was once the stuff of science fiction movies, like Minority Report. It is now part of our reality, though, and it is available to anyone willing to use it.

WIth this in mind, perhaps a little caution is necessary. The deeper and much darker lesson here is that these tools can be used to influence the hearts and mind of a nation. How wisely will we use it from now on?