By Deepa Seetharaman
On Facebook, a little ad spending goes a long way -- and the
more contentious the ads are, the farther they may go.
Facebook Inc. disclosed last week that Russian entities spent
some $150,000 for ads about "divisive" topics during a two-year
period that included the U.S. presidential race.
Compared with the $1.4 billion spent on digital ads in races
during the 2016 election season, $150,000 is a drop in the bucket.
But the Russian-backed messages may have had outsize reach, ad
buyers say, because Facebook favors ads that grab users' attention
and make them click, whether the content is political or otherwise,
sensational or not.
In all, the Russians' ads could have reached 3 million to 20
million or more people on the social network, according to digital
advertising experts including Joe Yakuel, founder and chief
executive of Agency Within, a New York-based firm that manages more
than $100 million a year in digital ad purchases, mainly for
e-commerce companies.
Facebook has said little about the approximately 5,200 ads,
which mostly centered on hot-button social and political issues
like immigration and race relations. Facebook declined to say what
the ads looked like, how many people they reached or who the
targets were.
Depending on how they are presented, ads on such provocative
topics can have wide reach at a low cost if the messages go viral
or gain traction among their target audience, say ad buyers who
work with companies and political candidates to create Facebook
campaigns. Experts cautioned that it isn't clear how well the
Russian-backed ads performed or whether they swayed the
election.
Facebook ads that appear in users' news feeds power the vast
majority of its revenue, which amounted to more than $17 billion
for the first half of 2017, according to company financial reports.
In Facebook's internal ad-auction system, ads compete in billions
of auctions a day for slots in users' news feeds. The system tends
to reward ads that spark engagement -- by getting users to click,
share or otherwise spend time viewing -- and sometimes it picks
such ads over less-engaging ads that have a higher bid, advertisers
say.
"When you put out an ad and Facebook sees that relative to other
ads this is one is getting a lot of shares, that really seems to
drive the cost down," said Anthony Astolfi, creative director at
IVC Media, who led digital advertising for Gary Johnson's
presidential campaign.
Mr. Yakuel said Agency Within once launched a video ad campaign
that he would describe only as "controversial" for a corporate
client that he wouldn't identify. The day before the campaign,
32,500 Facebook users had engaged with the client's ads. The client
spent only a fraction of a penny, or 0.024 cent, for each user its
ads were intended to reach. After the video launched, 55,000 users
engaged, and the cost of reaching a single user dropped 30% to
0.017 cent, he said.
"If you have strong opinions on two sides of the same topic,
those will typically be more engaging," Mr. Yakuel said. "Even
inadvertent controversy can cause a lot of engagement."
Advertisers sometimes pay extra to reach Facebook users with
specific interests, such as car buyers or spa enthusiasts, or who
have conservative or liberal political views. The cost for reaching
voters in an election year is around $5 per 1,000 impressions but
can shoot up to $10 closer to Election Day, one buyer
estimated.
Facebook's disclosure of Russian-bought ads has reignited
questions about how much the company shaped political debate during
the 2016 presidential campaign by enabling the spread of divisive
advertising and free posts containing misinformation across the
platform.
Both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton bought Facebook ads to
raise money and warn about the other candidate. A pro-Clinton super
PAC ran a four-part animated series that painted a bleak future
under Mr. Trump; other Clinton ads focused on signing up volunteers
or registering voters. Some Trump ads hawked "Make American Great
Again" hats and other gear, touted his debate performance or called
Mrs. Clinton corrupt.
The Trump campaign's ads drew more engagement on Facebook, in
the form of clicks and other signals, than those of the Clinton
camp, according to people familiar with the internal figures.
Representatives for the two campaigns' digital ad teams declined to
comment. Facebook declined to comment on the candidates' relative
performance.
The Trump campaign paid roughly $90 million for digital ads to
Giles-Parscale, a San Antonio-based web-marketing company run by
Brad Parscale, the campaign's digital director. The Clinton camp
paid more than $100 million to Bully Pulpit Interactive, which led
that team's digital marketing strategy.
During the Democratic primary, Bernie Sanders's campaign bought
Facebook ads urging the U.S. to welcome Syrian refugees, said
Keegan Goudiss, partner at Revolution Messaging and former director
of digital advertising for the campaign. The ads were shown to
Facebook users in mostly Republican states, such as Maryland, whose
governors objected to the resettling Syrian refugees without more
vetting, Mr. Goudiss said.
The most successful version of the ad campaign drew 75% of its
impressions through organic sharing on Facebook, Mr. Goudiss added.
This sharing lowered the campaign's effective cost of reaching
every user.
About 3,000 of the Russian-bought ads were connected to accounts
created by a single pro-Kremlin firm, the Internet Research Agency.
The ads came to light less than two months after Facebook asserted
it found no evidence of Russian purchases of ads on the platform.
One of the Russian accounts that bought ads, Facebook has said, was
Secured Borders, a page with more than 133,000 followers that
promoted an anti-immigration rally planned for August 2016 in Twin
Falls, Idaho. The rally, first reported by The Daily Beast, was
canceled, according to an archived version of the event page.
This week, members of the Senate Intelligence Committee said
they would likely hold a public hearing and ask Facebook
representatives to detail Russian activity on the platform during
the election season.
Write to Deepa Seetharaman at Deepa.Seetharaman@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
September 15, 2017 09:08 ET (13:08 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2017 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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