Online attack adverts warned voters in key seats how Labour would hit them in pocket
THE Conservatives targeted voters in the most marginal seats with tailored Facebook and Instagram advertisements featuring warnings about how a Labour government would raise the cost of petrol and hike inheritance tax.
A final Facebook assault last weekend included advertisements claiming that Labour’s plans would put petrol up by 16p, heating bills by £65 and cost households more than £325,000 in inheritance tax.
The Conservatives also used attack ads against prominent Labour MPs in pro-Leave constituencies, telling voters how many times the incumbent had “voted against Brexit”. Some advertisements featured a Photoshopped image of the Labour incumbent carrying their personal effects from an office, in a cardboard box.
The Facebook advertisement archive shows the Tories spent £1,400 on attack ads in Ed Miliband’s Doncaster North seat, which voted 70 per cent for Leave, and Yvette Cooper’s Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford constituency, where the vote was 69 per cent.
Significant amounts were also spent on targeting videos at traditional Labour voters. One, for which the Tories paid £10,000 to target one million Facebook users, showed a BBC clip of a lifelong Labour voter in the Black Country saying the party had “fallen apart” under Jeremy Corbyn and he was voting for Boris Johnson as he “liked what he was trying to do”.
The advertisements ran alongside those carrying the Conservatives’ national messages of “ending the uncertainty” and “getting Brexit done”.
From Tuesday, the Tories targeted advertisements at Conservative-held marginals with two key messages: First, that Mr Corybn was ‘‘12 seats away’’ from becoming prime minister with the help of Jo Swinson and Nicola Sturgeon; and second, that the Conservatives only needed “nine more seats” to “get Brexit done”. Target seats included Chingford and Calder Valley.
The Facebook campaign had echoes of the Vote Leave social media strategy of testing messages and then hammering home the most effective to key voters in the final days.
Unlike Labour and the Lib Dems, the Tories did not spend on Snapchat, which is popular with voters under 24.