Facebook charged Biden a higher price than Trump for campaign ads
In swing states, Biden paid average ad rates of $34 compared with Trump’s average of $17 in July and August
Effective Facebook advertising has become key to winning elections
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has estimated the platform will make$420 million on political adsthis election cycle. (TV advertising for national and local races, which is much more expensive, is expected tototal more than $7 billion.)
Collectively, Biden and Trump have spent $183 million on advertising on Facebook and Instagram this year, which said they would cut off selling new political ads this week as part of an effort to limitmisinformation.
Facebook’s microtargeting capabilitieswere little more than a curiosityin 2012, but since then the platform, and its vast trove of user data, have become a major part of campaign strategy to badger core supporters for donations and target specifically crafted messages to groups of undecided voters.
“Their platform allows political campaigns to have broad reach into demographics like seniors and suburban women that are particularly valuable audiences in 2020,” Regan Opel, a former Republican political consultant who now works with progressive clients, told The Markup. She also cited Facebook’s “list matching capabilities that give us the precision needed to reach communities that have historically been under-represented in politics.”
Trump’s surprise victory in 2016 has beenattributedto his campaign’s use of Facebook for raising money, energizing supporters, and “attempts to deter” Clinton supporters through microtargeted negative ads. One prominent Facebook executive saidin an internal memo thatTrump “ran the single best digital ad campaign I’ve ever seen from any advertiser.”
After the 2016 election, officials from both the Trump and Clinton campaignssaidTrump consistently got lower prices on Facebook ads. Facebook, however, publisheda chartthat it said showed Trump paying slightly higher prices.
Google severely restricted its microtargeting choices for political adslast year, eliminating the ability to target voters based on their political affiliation or voting record, in response to controversy over misinformation. The candidates still bought $158 million worth of ads from that company this year, according tothe search and video giant’s political ads transparency reports. Those reports don’t provide sufficiently granular data to calculate CPMs, though Google uses auctions and “quality” algorithms to set prices too. (The company didn’t respond to a request for comment.)
Facebook’s pricing decisions are opaque, but experts say they favor “controversial” content
Campaigns get charged through the same opaque, complex pricing mechanism as other advertisers, whether political or commercial: a split-secondautomated auction, with other factors playing a role, including subsidies for ads that an algorithm rates as more “relevant.”
The auction pits potential advertisers against one another each time a user is shown an ad, which means higher prices for ads targeting people whose attention is in greater demand.
In the thick of the campaign, voters in swing states who candidates think might be persuadable are some of the most valuable, expensive targets.
“You’re competing against every other person, there will be an overlap between who the Trump campaign and the Biden campaign and all these corporate brands are talking to,” Annie Levene, a Democratic digital campaign expert, told The Markup.
Digital strategists have made careers out of excavating the black box that is Facebook’s advertising system and gaming it to their clients’ advantage. Several told The Markup that, in their experience, the makeup of the target audience—both who is in it and how big it is—is a major factor in ad pricing.
Our analysis found instances where identical ads targeted at different audiences had very different prices.
For instance,one of Biden’s cheapest adspromised “access to affordable quality health care, for everyone” to an audience of Minnesotans in mid-September. Facebook showed it for an estimated price of $2.30 per 1,000 views.
A week later,an identical adwas shown to one-third as many Floridians but cost far more—a cost of $129 per 1,000 impressions.
Facebook charged Biden $150 per thousand impressions of a “Your prescriptions shouldn’t empty your wallet” video ad, which went to seniors, disproportionately in Florida, in early September. It was one of Biden’s most expensive.
Facebook’s algorithm also favors “relevance,” and based on predictions made by itsmachine-learning algorithms,subsidizesads that Facebook considers more relevant. Relevance, as Facebook defines it, is a function of Facebook’s estimate of the rate at which people engage with the ad and Facebook’s judgment of the ad’s “quality.”
Facebook doesn’t disclose the advertiser’s target audience for the ads, nor does it disclose how its algorithms rate the ad’s relevance, so it’s impossible to say how much of an ad’s ultimate price was the product of its target audience and how much was due to subsidies by Facebook. Osborne didn’t respond to The Markup’s question as to whether Facebook has checked for algorithmic bias, political or otherwise, in its relevance algorithms.
In 2018, a Facebook executivetweetedthat the benefit of the subsidies was “on the order of +/- 10%.”
But Facebook’s opacity doesn’t stop the campaigns from guessing what is inside the black box.
Eric Wilson, a Republican digital strategist, has noticed a trend. “The ads perform better if they drive more engagement and interaction on the platform,” Wilson said.
“If you’re a campaign tapping into more relevant and timely and engaging topics, which we should always read as controversial, then you’re going to get a better ad rate,” he said.
Facebook’s ad quality algorithms also analyze an ad’scontent, not just users’ reactions to it. An apparent effect of these algorithms is that Facebook charges more to show liberal ads to conservative Facebook users or vice versa, compared to showing liberal content to liberals, according toa Northeastern University study.
Responding to that study, Osborne toldThe Washington Postlast year, “Ads should be relevant to the people who see them. It’s always the case that campaigns can reach the audiences they want with the right targeting, objective and spend.”
Political advertising is regulated — just not as tightly on digital platforms
Ravel, the former member of the Federal Election Commission, said that if Facebook is favoring controversial ads—and charging less for them—“that’s problematic for our democracy.”
Some digital strategists have called for tighter regulations on advertising on digital platforms.
“That’s the real scandal of all of this. In every other industry, candidates pay the same rate. I can’t go out to a TV station and get a better rate because my ad’s better produced,” Wilson said.
For now, charging candidates different prices for online ads is legal.
“If the ad pricing mechanism is established based on [Facebook’s] own business practices, and some candidates are better at exploiting the pricing mechanism than others,” then it wouldn’t be an illegal in-kind contribution, Brendan Fischer, an attorney with nonpartisan campaign finance watchdog group Campaign Legal Center, told The Markup.
The calls for regulation go beyond price disparities in advertising. Unlike advertising on TV, ads on Facebook and Google are not subject to federal transparency laws that require disclaimers and disclosure of expenditure amounts.
Wilson, the Republican strategist,has proposed thatFacebook change its rules for candidates.
He told The Markup, “Ensure that they’re paying the same amount to reach the same voters.”
This article wasoriginally published on The Markupby Jeremy B. Merrill and was republished under theCreative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivativeslicense.
