Tories step up Facebook advertising in last leg of campaign

The Conservative party is stepping up advertising on Facebook, launching 2,600 new ads in the space of just 24 hours, signalling a major push on social media as the general election campaign enters its last 10 days.

Until now, the Tories have spent a fraction of the millions of pounds they have received from wealthy donors on Facebook and Instagram ads. The governing party has been significantly outspent by Labour and the Liberal Democrats who have spent more than £1m on social media since the start of November.

The 2,603 new ads that were taken out by the Conservatives on Sunday increased the number of active adverts being run by the party by more than a quarter, and constituted a significant shift: so far during this campaign, the most ads taken out in any one day by the Tories was just 145, on November 25th.

It’s not yet possible to know how much the Tories have spent on the new ads, as Facebook spending data has a three-day time delay, but the ads had been shown to at least 1m social media users as of Monday morning. 

Some political analysts expected the party to deploy a similar strategy to the one used by the Vote Leave campaign in the run-up to the 2016 referendum, led by Dominic Cummings — now prime minister Boris Johnson’s chief of staff. That strategy reportedly saw £1.5m being poured into digital ads in the final week of the campaign, with the campaign spending a total of £2.7m on targeted ads on Facebook.

“Our guess was that Cummings was going to do what he did in 2016 with the late spending splurge, and it looks like that’s what’s happening,” said Ben Stewart, one of the four founding members of Led By Donkeys, a satirical anti-Brexit campaign group. “Elections are, to a certain extent, Facebook elections nowadays.”

The increase in Facebook ads came as the tech group, whose head of communications is former deputy prime minister and Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg, took down one of the Tories’ ads, saying it violated its intellectual property rules. The 15-second video ad, which featured heavily edited TV footage, had already been criticised by the BBC, whose lawyers had asked the Tories to remove it.

Almost 950 of the new ads taken out by the Conservatives carried the message “Let’s end the chaos and uncertainty and make parliament work for you again”, while just over 850 focused on the party’s promises to invest in the NHS, education and policing. More than 200 featured the Union Jack emoji and a video with the message “Vote to deliver Brexit; vote to respect the referendum”.

The Tories also took out two adverts that focused on terrorism, following Friday’s attack in London. Johnson has been criticised by one of the victims’ fathers for using the incident to his political advantage.

One featured a clip from a Sky News interview with Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, with the headline “Labour want weaker sentences for terrorists” in capital letters. That had been shown to more than 25,000 Facebook and Instagram users as of midday on Monday — more than any of the other ads taken out by the party on Sunday, 2,000 of which had reached less than 1,000 users.