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27th February 2018

Trump’s Facebook advertising advantage, explained (washingtonpost.com).

Brad Parscale (left) at Trump Tower. Image: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post
Brad Parscale (left) at Trump Tower. Image: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post
Brad Parscale is, at his core, a digital marketer. Over the course of 2016, his client was Donald Trump, and Parscale’s management of Trump’s online advertising efforts were no small…

Yep, eye-rolling was occurring as soon as read “digital marketer”, many of which are found on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and wherever else offering interesting deals on everything from fitness equipment to e-cigarettes from their digital marketing empire making bedroom. And, unsurprisingly for a digital marketer named today as the campaign manager for Trump’s 2020 reelection bid:

Since the 2016 campaign ended, Parscale has been investing a lot of his digital marketing energy in another client: himself.

But Parscale and more humble bedroom-based digital marketers are of course not alone in seeing the advertising bonanza that social media is:

Over the weekend, that meant plugging Wired’s extensive look at how Trump’s campaign effectively used Facebook. And, in response to a question posed by Wired editor in chief Nick Thompson, a bold claim about how much more effective his campaign’s ad spending was relative to Hillary Clinton’s.

Which basically boiled down to the Clinton campaign paying hundreds of times more appealing to voters in Silicon Valley than what Parscale’s campaign for Orange Don did to run 1,000 Facebook ads appealing to Deporables in Arse Elbow, Nebraska—and because Facebook saw it as in their ad revenue interest too. And lets not forget, Russia’s Internet Research Agency led by thirteen individuals now indicted by the FBI with a $1.25 million monthly budget (uk.businessinsider.com) picking up the slack running the rest.

But not only was their demographic different, so were the ads deemed suited for their demographic:

Not only were the audiences different, but the ads themselves were, too. … Clinton ran a lot of video ads, aiming to boost turnout or make the case for her candidacy. Trump’s ads were often single images with an enticement to click. The ads were designed to do different things.

With lots of #MAGA puffery in Trump’s case cooing to those who’d not dared take their conspiracy dungarees off for some time, and encouraging them to spend:

Many of those ads were fundraising pitches aimed at doing things like encouraging people to buy campaign gear. By late October, the campaign had spent more on Trump hats than on polling.

Orange Don’s static, merchandisable ads being cheap to tweak and reuse:

Parscale explained that the Trump campaign ran thousands of versions of its ads each day—up to 100,000 iterations of an ad on one day—in which language and visuals were tweaked to entice as many people as possible to click. Put another way, the Trump campaign’s use of static images that could be tweaked in infinite, subtle ways gave it an advantage for proving to Facebook’s ad auction tool that it would earn clicks and comments.

Offering F’book a better opportunity for ad revenue too:

What’s more, the Trump campaign had Facebook staff embedded with their team who helped guide their ability to maximize their investment. Given that Trump’s team spent tens of millions of dollars with the company (Parscale told CBS that Facebook ate up 80 percent of his $94 million ad budget), that clearly made business sense.

The potential for ad revenue profit overriding all in the Insta-era’s populist campaigning by social media seemingly as crooked anything Hillary could be said to have pulled out of her pantsuit:

That’s the central point. If Trump’s content is better clickbait, it costs less, because Facebook wants to reward engagement so that it can keep people sticking around to view more ads.

Making the collective stammer and #shockface of F’book, Twitter ’n’ all when grilled by congress over ad spending splurge Russian meddling had invested too (theguardian.com, Oct. 2017) seen by many for exactly what it was, with them then pledging to ban bot account—and take an ad profitable location-finding phone number from all—give tool to assess if you were tricked by Russian propaganda rather than American propaganda with a conspicuous Russian accent and pledge to concentrate on local, “community” news in future.

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Illustrations, paintings, and cartoons featuring caricatured celebrities are intended purely as parody and fantasised depictions often relating to a particular news story, and often parodying said story and the media and pop cultural representation of said celebrity as much as anything else. Who am I really satirising? Read more.

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