Digital Advertising, Social Media & The 2020 Election

It's likely you’ve seen digital ads for every major candidate going into this 2020 US election cycle. It was probably easy for you to scroll through those ads and not think much about them; as digital advertising has ballooned into one of the largest industries in the world, we see targeted ads often enough to not always give them a second thought. But keep in mind, this is only the fourth US presidential election that has leaned into digital advertising and, as a country and as a global industry, in only sixteen years time, this is a major swing toward digitization.

We’re still learning how that works -- and doesn’t work.

Facebook has been one of the major sources of online political advertising in recent years: in 2008, Barack Obama’s campaign was praised for their use of online advertising, yet less than an estimated $500,000 was spent on Facebook ads. In 2016, just eight years later, Donald Trump’s campaign spent tens of millions of dollars on Facebook ads. In the realm of digital transformation statistics, that’s a huge leap in a few short years. According to Vox, an estimated 7 billion dollars will have been spent on the 2020 election cycle in totality of campaign spend (a combined total by all parties) and a large share of that will be spent on digital ads, setting yet another new record.

Statista estimates from earlier this year (February, 2020) show a substantial discrepancy between the two leading presidential candidates in their online campaign spending -- claiming 39 million dollars of digital spending by Donald Trump, mainly on Facebook and Google, while reporting Joe Biden only spent 5.8 million on digital ads in the same timeframe, granted these reports are from early 2020 so naturally, things have changed a bit since then.

While we don’t currently have the exact numbers, according to AdExchanger, on October 29th, 2020, “If Donald Trump owned H1 for programmatic ad spending, Joe Biden is dominating the second half of the year.” Biden made significant jumps in programmatic spending, particularly in videos, after his official Democratic nomination.

But was it too little too late? The early spending from the Trump administration could have already made the difference on Facebook; The New York Times reported just last week that Biden is still seriously lagging behind Trump's Facebook engagements to the tune of Donald Trump hitting 130 million total engagements versus just 18 million total engagements for Joe Biden. (Data reported by CrowdTangle, a Facebook data platform.) If you look at the numbers alone, disregarding the type of content, 6.7x greater early online spending correlated to 7.22x greater total Facebook engagement as of the week before the election; those numbers are close enough in my opinion to suggest positive correlation, but don't factor in the spending throughout second half of the year.

While it’s clear that campaign spend on Facebook shows increased engagement overall, the extent to which Facebook engagements translate into American votes is less clear since one person can be responsible for multiple engagements, and engagement doesn’t necessarily qualify them as an eligible US voter.

Navigating social media as a form of earned media value is tricky.

As we’ve seen in The Social Dilemma (2020) there is quantitative proof that sensational and inaccurate information draws more attention, more engagement, and more screen time.

People are more likely to share and continue interacting with content that activates either fear or anger, so triggering the amygdala and these very basal emotions via visceral content is an extremely effective way to boost viewership. Does that type of false, sensational media pay off? It can. It has. And, unfortunately, without proactive interventions it still does. Advertising in this way can potentially save a lot of ad spending when your followers on social media are doing all the dissemination for free, be it out of fear or rage.

Whether or not this type of strategic misinformation will pay off for this particular election is yet to be seen. It will come down to determining if the sheer quantity of engagement or the quality of it will make the difference in number of votes, and the answer to that determination is going to be very telling for the future of digital ads in campaigns. Looking at other candidates and their social media campaigns, it would appear that the number of views on social platforms alone might not be enough to compel voter support.

You may remember that candidate Michael Bloomberg spent over 900 million dollars advertising his campaign, much of which was focused on influencer marketing on Instagram intended to target younger audiences than that of Facebook. While many Americans viewed Bloomberg’s ad campaigns, anecdotal evidence would suggest that the lighthearted memes just ultimately weren’t the right kind of advertising to inspire voters. It must be noted that, obviously, the dollars spent do not take into consideration the actual quality of the candidate or their campaign.

Of course, online political advertising comes with its pitfalls such as occasionally intentional misinformation, unintended backlash, unregulated content, anonymous sponsorship, and sensationalism; as with all new technologies and developments, there will be kinks to work out. With the type of exponential growth we’re seeing in this digital marketing sphere, one can only imagine the changes, insights, and new strategies that will come to be by the next election cycles of 2022 and 2024.

Witnessing digital marketing grow and scale in such a way to keep up with the American public is fascinating to watch. Regardless of who wins this election, it’s clear to me that digital engagement, for better or worse, is going to be the new normal and is here to stay in United States politics.

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Christopher Martin is a lifelong entrepreneur and currently the Co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of MightyHive, a global leader in advanced marketing and technology services that deploys and supports enterprise software for real-time, data-driven marketing. He also sits on the executive board of directors for S4 Capital, one of the largest and most successful digital advertising consultancies worldwide.