Ad buys will be crucial in next election
Do Canadian conservatives watch more TV than other partisans?
One would have to assume that is the case, given what the federal political parties have revealed about their spending patterns during last year’s election.
Election-spending reports are always interesting as exercises in accountability, but they also tell some fascinating stories of political culture and where the parties believe they can find their support. These newest reports, released by Elections Canada this week, are no exception.
Of all the ways in which Conservatives and Liberals differ in this day and age, it turns out that TV is emerging as a point of departure.
During the fall election campaign, the Conservatives spent nearly twice what Justin Trudeau and his Liberals spent on ads for television viewers — $9.3 million compared to $5.2 million. The difference was even sharper in the official lead-up to the campaign last summer: about $1.2 million in TV ads for Conservatives, compared to just $400,000 for the ruling Liberals.
This really does look like a battle of the centuries, when it comes to advertising: Conservatives are still heavily reliant on the mass-marketing, 20thcentury appeal of the TV airwaves, while the federal Liberals are moving their dollars to the online world of the 21st century, where ads are cheaper and easier to target to specific audiences.
The spending reports filed to Elections Canada don’t give precisely neat categories for the dollars spent pursuing votes online by any of the parties, but after a bit of explanation from party officials, it looks like Liberals spent more than $7 million online, compared to about $4.6 million for the Conservatives during the election campaign. (Liberals lump some of their online spending into the miscellaneous category called “other,” while Conservatives reserve that category for expenses such as promotional merchandise and public-transit ads.)
In the pre-writ period before the campaign, Liberals spent nearly $900,000 online, while Conservatives spent about $460,000.
When it comes to other ways of getting the message out — as the pros say — the differences between Canada’s two big parties are smaller, though occasionally eye-catching.
Conservatives spent slightly more on radio ads — $1.7 million, compared to just over $1 million for the Liberals. Meanwhile, Liberals definitely spent more on print media — that’s newspapers — a whopping $197,000, compared to zero for the Conservatives.
Yes, that doesn’t appear to be a typographical error — zero in print-media ads for the Conservatives.
As someone did point out to me, however, it is possible that local Conservative candidates took out print advertising in their community’s newspapers, and that level of spending isn’t included in these national reports. Still, no one will be saying that either of these big Canadian political parties did much directly to boost the ad revenues of newspapers in the 2019 campaign.
Ten or 15 years ago, when Conservatives became pioneers in the realm of digital campaigning and big data, it seemed unlikely that we would see them clinging to TV and the old ways of advertising in 2019.
But Liberals, initially the slowest pokes in the rush to big-data campaigning, have clearly become major converts, according to some research that is now emerging about how the 2019 election unfolded online.
One team of academics, working in a project called the “Digital Ecosystem Research Challenge,” released some early findings back in February, and several of the studies show the ways in which Liberals have embraced the microtargeting capabilities of online ads.
“While all parties targeted voters to some extent, such as by age and location, the Liberal Party appeared to make greater use of Facebook’s targeting tools than its competitors,” said one of the studies.
So here, then, is how the Conservative and the Liberal campaigns really differed in 2019: Conservatives were mass marketing and Liberals were target-marketing.
Which one was superior? Well, the Liberals won the election, but the Conservatives won the popular vote. You could argue on that score that both worked, but the Liberals had a more focused eye on the votes they needed and where they were. I learned the same thing late last year when I reported on how the Liberals won the 2019 campaign — the extent to which they knew where and how to pursue the votes they needed was impressive.
“Justin Trudeau didn’t win the election. Justin Trudeau’s campaign organization won the election,” pollster Nik Nanos said then, based on his analysis of the 2019 results.
Conservatives also spent about $2 million more than the Liberals to fight the 2019 campaign, which proves that you can’t just buy your way to victory in Canadian elections. It’s how you spend the money that counts, and if these new spending reports are any guide, apparently the choice between TV and online advertising is a crucial one.