advocacy elections

New Changes Coming to Facebook

Over the past year, the digital advertising space has seen many changes in regard to data and user privacy. One of the…

Over the past year, the digital advertising space has seen many changes in regard to data and user privacy. One of the larger platforms that are seeing these changes is Facebook. Recently, the social media giant has been reevaluating how advertisers can target voters and consumers in the platform.

In August, the platform removed 5,000 targeting segments around ethnicity and religion to prevent discrimination. Founder Mark Zuckerberg has promised to make Facebook a “privacy focused communications platform.” On top of this, the New York Times revealed federal prosecutors are investigating the platform’s data deals with technology companies.

As of last week, Facebook is editing and removing certain political targeting segments. This will make it more difficult to build very precise universes using the platform’s built-in audiences. 

Additionally, Facebook is going to remove the ability to exclude certain political audience segments. For instance, advertisers would not be able to run ads to an audience of “US politics (conservative)” and at the same time exclude a second audience of “likely to engage with political content (liberal).”

For political campaigns, this news can be unsettling. Facebook’s value is the rich information users voluntarily share about who they are, likes, and beliefs, including political preferences. This allows campaigns to run the right messaging to the right people.

What is a campaign to do?

Don’t become reliant on black box platforms like Facebook to communicate with your target voters. By collecting, building and owning your own data resources, this data can be onboarded for advertising across the digital ecosystem and directly compliment your offline voter contact strategy.

Majority Strategies doesn’t simply have “big data.” Through our partnership with Causeway Solutions, we have proprietary actionable data built for each stage of the political cycle. Whether you are recruiting candidates to run for office, building your social media following of known supporters, reaching out to likely donors, or persuading and turning out voters essential to reaching your vote goal, our ability to create custom, tailor-made audiences with the highest quality data provides tactical advantages for campaigns and causes. This includes:

  • A voter file on over 200 million Americans including vote history, political affiliations, and issue models
  • Consumer file on 300 million Americans including purchase history, demographics, and lifestyle
  • Over 50,000 audience segments such as “Soccer Moms,” “Reads Field and Stream,” and “Purchased Ford Truck”

The currency for today’s marketers is data. Taking control of the data resources at your disposable will give your campaign a competitive advantage.

Ready to learn more? Contact our team of strategists today.