How Facebook Works for Trump
Updated on April 18 at 2:00 p.m.
Look at a thousand of the millions of Facebook ads Donald Trump has run, and it’s hard to believe that they represent a winning strategy. They recycle the same imagery and themes, over and over: Trump, photoshopped in front of a flag, points a finger. Trump claps before an audience. Trump gives a thumbs-up, or smiles at a microphone. Each image is washed in patriotic red or blue. The text almost always issues a call to action: Buy this hat, sign this petition, RSVP to this rally.
They are notable only in their banality, and in their sheer volume. During the 2016 election cycle, Trump’s team ran 5.9 million ads on Facebook, spending $44 million from June to November alone. Hillary Clinton’s campaign ran only 66,000. In 2020, Democrats are still buying fewer ads: According to the Facebook ad archive, only Michael Bloomberg approached the ad volume of the Trump campaign, running more than 50,000 ads in February of this year, his last month in the race. During that time, Bernie Sanders bought only 8,400, Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden even fewer. Everyone is using Facebook, but Trump is doing something different and, by most accounts, better.
[Read: The billion-dollar disinformation campaign to reelect the president]
At the start of the year, Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, who led Facebook’s ad team during the 2016 election, wrote that Trump “ran the single best digital ad campaign I’ve ever seen from any advertiser.” Trump’s team agrees, of course.
But that might not mean what you think it does. Trump didn’t master Facebook because of foreign interference by Russia or psychographic exploitation via Cambridge Analytica. He didn’t do it via microtargeting—the ability to send highly differentiated audiences just the right messages to change attitudes or inspire action—either, despite conventional understanding. His campaign did so via pure, blunt constancy, using Facebook in exactly the way the tech giant intended: pouring heaps of money and data into Facebook’s automated advertising system.
Trump’s 2020 digital director, Gary Coby, compared the strategy to high-frequency financial trading: Facebook has built an algorithmic ad-buying system with a mercenary drive toward results, and Trump’s campaign exploits it tirelessly. In the artificial-intelligence field, this system is the opposite of self-driving cars or robots or virtual assistants: a deeply boring, basically invisible application of machine learning that
