A Latticework Insight: What do Mayor Pete, Gun Safety, and Donald Trump Share In Common?
One of the worst kept secrets in the media world of this last year is that both Facebook and Google now publish the ad spend data for anyone spending buy political ads on their platforms. You read that right: every single political ad, including the entire budget spent to promote it, as well as the audiences they targeted are made available to the public...for download!
It’s a pretty groundbreaking development, especially for folks interested in the intersection of politics and media (Are there people not interested in politics and media??) and it’s created a burgeoning ecosystem of data-savvy analysts like Bully Pulpit Interactive and ACRONYM servicing an industry that’s ravenous for this type of political insights. The NYTimes, Axios, FiveThirtyEight, and ProPublica have released jaw dropping graphs detailing for example Donald Trump’s eye-popping media spend advantage over the Democratic field, Joe Biden’s spend surge after announcing his candidacy, and Tom Steyer’s much-lauded August surge “buying his way onto the Democratic debate” stage.
Facebook even enables you to drill-down and view any individual ad unit run by any organization that it has deemed to be “political”:
The data feeds are groundbreaking because they make it transparent which tactics are being employed by candidates, PAC’s, and non-profit political groups. It also enables voters (not to mention media planners!) to see how capital is being deployed to achieve political goals, an often murky and poorly documented arena.
It also enables us to see beyond the obvious “Trump is Leading” narrative and dive into strategic maneuvers, such as the practice of trying lots of different messaging and creative, also know as “throwing spaghetti at the wall”. Donald Trump for example - well known for his whatever-works approach to politics - has spent $5M on 43,000 pieces of creative in the last 90 days. Tom Steyer in contrast, has spent $6M on only 3,000 pieces of creative. In short, the Steyer campaign thinks they know the right message, and they’re sticking to it. In effect Steyer, is betting $2,000 on each piece of creative whereas Trump is only betting about $100. (Said in slightly more colorful terms, Steyer spent spent $6M per minute of speaking time in his last debate.)
Betting the farm on a rigid set of messages is a well documented strategy for - to cite an example from recent history - losing the 2016 Presidential Election. Or said another way, thinking that we know all the right messaging up front, without A/B testing the results against reality, is generally a bad idea. Trying lots of variations is a well established practice in media buying, and the Pete Buttigieg campaign - the 3rd leading spender in the last 90 days - seems to be following in the Trump campaign’s footsteps.
If we look at another segment of political ad buyers, Gun Safety (in blue) and Gun Advocacy (in red) groups appear to follow a very similar strategy.
Although the number of Gun Advocacy groups on Facebook outnumber Gun Safety groups by a large margin, in the last 2 years the gun safety world has outpaced that of the NRA and other rivals.
One thing the Facebook dataset lacks is the dimension of effectiveness. Did this particular spend and these particular ad units actually create campaign contributions or email sign-ups? The click-through rates and cost-per-acquisition numbers are not made available by Facebook or Google so you’d need to use a trick from the Latticework skillset to get that answer. Turns out, it’s actually pretty common to need to do some heavy data integration before you get to that insight.
(Sales Pitch: Latticework Insights specializes in Integration, Analytics, and Insights all under one roof!)
Since any political organization doing fundraising needs to file their revenue with the FEC - who also makes this data publicly available for download - with some crafty integration work, we can stitch together a quick story about whether these efforts were able to turn a dollar of ad spend into a multiple dollars of donations.
By stitching the Facebook, Google, and FEC datasets together we can estimate widely used media buying metrics such CPA (Cost per Acquisition) and ROAS (Return on Ad Spend). We estimated Based on the Q3 FEC filings, you could estimate that the Giffords PAC has a ROAS of about $11 (pretty good!) versus the NRA which is at about $8. Or in other words, for every dollar that Gifford PAC spends on Facebook, they are seeing about $11 in contributions.
If you’re a savvy media buyer (and we assume that all of our readers are!) you’ll notice we sidestepped a pretty important step in Attribution which is we’re not considering all of the other channels used to drive fundraising such as Email, SMS, Linear TV, or any variety of earned media like social media, press, or word-of-mouth. This is known as a Multi Channel Attribution problem and is beyond the scope of this article. It is not however beyond the scope of the next article!
So if this type of analysis is intriguing to you, please drop us a line. We look forward to digging into this type of data more, and would love to help you or your company with these sorts of integration, analytics, insights, media, and advertising problems.
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