Facebook still key in 2020 despite scandals
Castro plugging ads as new rules on site reveal scope of effort
WASHINGTON — Julián Castro pushed out hundreds of Facebook ads over the weekend, hoping to parlay his success in the first 2020 presidential debate into the thousands of new donors he’ll need to reach the Democrats’ debate stage in the fall.
On Monday, Facebook reported that Castro’s $78,000 in spending the past day was exceeded only by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ among Democratic presidential hopefuls, and even topped expenditures by President Donald Trump’s social media-heavy re-election effort.
Facebook is under investigation around the world for privacy lapses.
Nonetheless, the social network remains a political tool that is only growing more essential in the 2020 presidential contest as well as in races for Congress in Texas and elsewhere.
In the past 90 days alone, presidential candidates and their supporters spent more than $14 million, according to an accounting of ads that can be found on the Facebook site.
What has changed since the 2016 era of political tricksters operating with impunity is transparency. Facebook’s ad library — a year-old concession to critics expanded further this spring — has raised the curtain on what once had been a secret world of persuasion.
In the 2016 elections, it couldn’t be known what people were doing digitally beyond general levels of spending. With no government regulation of online political ads,
loopholes remain, critics say, among them the disappearance of key disclosure details once ads are shared.
But heading into the 2020 election, anybody can review a sea of ads about issues, elections and politics — thousands in the last week alone — and see how candidates spend on a daily basis. People who take the time can know what segments of the electorate candidates appeal to, as well as the states where would-be donors live, all essential elements of campaign strategies.
One of Castro’s post-debate Facebook ads, for instance, was showed to 83 percent women, nearly a quarter of them in Texas. Two-thirds of people who saw another such spot were women, more in California than any other state.
“We’re in a different realm in 2020 in transparency around digital ads than during 2016, when Facebook ads were often viewable only by persons to whom they were targeted,” said Brendan Fischer, director of federal reform at the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center in Washington.
Last week, Kantar Media, which monitors media consumption, predicted that digital spending in 2020 would reach $1.2 billion, 20 percent of all political ads.
Trump — who raged on Twitter earlier this year that Facebook is “sooo on the side of the Radical Left Democrats” — remains Facebook’s biggest 2020 campaign advertiser. The president’s re-election arm and a super PAC supporting him spent nearly $4 million on Facebook ads in the past 90 days, the database shows.
Facebook users also routinely see a vast array of Trump trinkets, from hats to socks to “victory medals,” from merchandisers aiming at the president’s base.
With polls showing Hispanics deeply distrustful of the president, an entity called Latinos for Trump — part of Trump’s reelection arm — unleashed a barrage of recent Facebook ads with a video of the president asserting that Hispanic unemployment “is the lowest ever recorded.”
Weapon of choice: the list
El Paso Democrat Beto O’Rourke’s robust deployment of Facebook ads in his unsuccessful Senate run in Texas last year left him the second biggest author of Facebook ads behind Trump, with 9,600 ads in the archive.
O’Rourke has used Facebook more sparingly this year — spending nearly $600,000 — as he seeks footing in his presidential quest, roughly similar to his spending on Google ads, according to a tally by Bully Pulpit Interactive. But O’Rourke has returned to Facebook more liberally in recent weeks.
Campaigns advertise online to raise money and to build lists at a time emails are costing campaigns $20 or $30 apiece, sometimes more, according to strategists.
Ads often seek user participation in surveys of sorts, yielding emails for future money appeals and persuasion targets down the line. They also rely on Facebook to publicize coming events to selected lists, as both Castro and O’Rourke did to corral audiences for gatherings in Texas over the weekend.
Castro, who had not run even for statewide office before entering the presidential contest, was far behind O’Rourke and the half-dozen U.S. senators running, all with healthy contact lists of people who might become donors. And Castro has not had the wherewithal for aggressive digital forays until recently.
In a single day after the debate — which yielded Castro generally positive reviews — his campaign hauled in triple the receipts and donors from the previous best day, in April, when he unveiled an immigration plan and appeared on MSNBC with Rachel Maddow.
“One of the things that’s been very wonderful in the last several days was having 15 million people seeing the person in the debate that we’ve seen for a while, someone who will be a great president,” said Jennifer Fiore, Castro’s senior adviser for communications and digital. “That has been a very big deal for us.”
In congressional races, too, digital buys figure into early ad budgets. Democrat Mary Jennings “MJ” Hegar is leaning heavily on Facebook in the early stages of her attempted takedown of three-term GOP Texas Sen. John Cornyn.
A Hegar ad in May answered the question of “what’s wrong with Washington?” by showing the faces of Cornyn and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ken., popping out of cardboard boxes. More than 90 percent of people who would see a version of that appeal were 55 and over, mostly women.
A set of Hegar’s Facebook fundraising appeals aimed at different audiences that went up last week begins: “It’s time to send some real Texas values to the Senate.”
Cornyn, too, used Facebook earlier this year for spots questioning whether left-leaning politicians are growing “more extreme” in addition to an ad noting Trump’s support for him, and another calling for more border security.
Embracing analytics
Facebook users can expect more U.S. House action on their screens.
Last month, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee took aim at Texas Rep. Will Hurd with Facebook ads sent to thousands of Latinos accusing Hurd in Spanish of failing to speak out on behalf of migrant children left in a hot van outside a Texas detention facility last year.
Hurd, R-San Antonio, denied any communication oversight and described his efforts to boost funding for migrant children.
Hurd, who narrowly won reelection in November, is among a half-dozen Texas Republicans in the House being targeted by national Democrats in 2020, an offensive that is likely to include a heavy run of digital ads that can be tracked for their effectiveness.
In the 25 years since digital ads appeared in politics — first in the form of banner ads, and later those annoying pop-up ads — campaigns have become increasingly sophisticated in combining messages with organizing and measuring the results. Now they get the analytics daily, and use them to target their audiences and their messages on the fly.
With digital ads, campaigns can figure the cost of acquiring new email contacts, how frequently those addresses turn into donors and how long the conversion takes.
Betsy Page Sigman, a Georgetown University professor who studies social media, said she expects Facebook ads to evolve even more in sophistication by next year, another reason for even more disclosure.
“The speed of change is not going to get any slower,” she said. “They’re going to do it quickly, probably before people like you and me know what’s going on.”