How a Digital Ad Strategy That Helped Trump Is Being Used Against Him
Facebook users in five key swing states have been seeing a peculiar sequence of political ads pixelating their news feeds for the past six months.
It begins with a carousel ad from a page called United Research Group asking them to fill out a lengthy survey. Soon afterward, multiple ads from Pacronym, a progressive super PAC, begin to litter the Facebook experience of about half of those who had been surveyed. Then, an ad for a different but related survey appears.
This rather specific experience is an intentional and coordinated effort to reach persuadable voters in critical presidential battlegrounds, a result of months of work by a group of former Facebook employees and data scientists at the progressive nonprofit group Acronym.
Essentially, the group, which includes some who worked on the Trump campaign in 2016, has co-opted the political ad function on Facebook to perform real-time persuasion message testing, to get a sense of how voters are reacting to ads as they see them.
In the fast-paced world of digital advertising, the availability of real-time data beyond mere engagement is fairly small, leaving campaigns with a patchwork of clicks, old polling and hunches to assess the impact of the millions of dollars they are spending on digital platforms.
And Facebook, with about 220 million users in the country, remains the central digital vehicle for reaching Americans who are spending more time online during the coronavirus pandemic. About $100 million has already been spent on the platform for the 2020 presidential election.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/28/us/politics/Facebook-Acronym-advertising.html
