Highly targeted digital ads won it, adviser to Ford campaign says
Doug Ford won the Ontario election on Google and Facebook, and was never in any danger of losing — despite what some public polls indicated, says one of his top campaign organizers.
The Progressive Conservative leader appeared for a brief encounter with the media Friday after capturing a majority government the day before, the party’s first Ontario election win in almost 20 years.
His adviser — speaking on condition of anonymity — offered fascinating insights into how that happened, and the importance to the victory of digital warfare.
Elections until recently were fought largely in the news media and with television advertising.
But the PCs this time relied on “literally thousands” of online ads they produced inexpensively inhouse, the campaign official said.
With the ability to target specific demographic and geographic groups through Facebook and Google, those internet spots proved more important than any traditional media, the campaign official said.
The targeting was so precise, “a husband and a wife should not be seeing the same ads,” the organizer said.
And monitoring data suggest the Tories “crushed” the other parties in terms of the volume of their online advertising viewed by Ontario voters, he said.
Meanwhile, the media documenting elections are “increasingly irrelevant.” The PCs believe the mock TV news items produced by the Ford team and posted on Facebook were actually more influential for their potential supporters than real news coverage, said the adviser.
Ford, a blunt-speaking populist businessman who was best known until recently as brother of the late Toronto mayor Rob Ford, rode to a surprisingly clear-cut victory, picking up 76 seats to the NDP’s 40, the Liberals’ seven and Greens’ one.
He said Friday that his transition team had “hit the ground running,” while he had personally had amicable conversations with outgoing Premier Kathleen Wynne and NDP Leader Andrea Horwath, the new opposition leader. Ford said he had also talked to Prime Minister Trudeau, offering to back him in his fight against the tariffs imposed by U.S. President Donald Trump.
“I … said we would stand united against our neighbours to the south,” he told a news conference that lasted barely 12 minutes. “I’ll work hand in hand with the prime minister. And we’ll be successful.”
He also said he would act quickly on his pledge to have outside auditors do a “line-by-line” audit of the province’s books, laden with a ballooning debt.
The Tories had led in publicly released polls for months before Thursday ’s vote, with the Liberals and Wynne deeply unpopular after years of controversy. But by midMay those surveys were showing the NDP neck-and-neck with the PCs, largely because of falling Liberal numbers.
The campaign official said the NDP surge was real but never became a major threat; party pollster Dimitri Pantazopoulos showed the Tories’ seat count in the 124-riding legislature fluctuating between the mid-80s and mid-70s. A majority is assured with 63 or more.
Pantazopoulos predicted the final result within a single seat, said the organizer.
He lambasted some of the public polls — which at one point showed the New Democrats 17 percentage points ahead — as shoddily conducted, yet reported uncritically by the news media.
Pantazopoulos used large samples, polled often, and only in specific parts of the province where the party might pick up seats, making sure to weight for the likelihood of people to vote, said the official.
Asked what was key to avoiding the losses that other Tory leaders had suffered after entering the last two provincial elections ahead in the polls, he made a frank admission.
The Conservatives decided against releasing a fully costed platform that would show deficits and surpluses resulting from their promises, said the organizer. The party felt the result would have been too messy given an auditor general’s report that said the Liberals had underestimated the deficit by billions, said the organizer.
“We didn’t take the bait to get into a conversation about hypothetical budgets.”