It was presidential debate on Jan 14th and I couldn’t help check Facebook Ad Library to analyze marketing spend strategies of various political candidates on Facebook leading up to the debate.
And wow, there was a surprise! Mike Bloomberg’s team spent about 3.78 Million dollars in 4 days (Jan 9 – 13, 2020). This is an example of super burst spend strategy. It made sense considering that he couldn’t qualify for this debate. As polling approaches across various caucus, it is high time to gain as much popularity and political mileage as possible.
The interesting part is that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren spent almost the same amount (2.32 Million) from Sep 26, 2019 till date. Bernie Sanders was at about 3.15M while Elizabeth Warren was at 3.74 M.
Is burst spend strategy good?
It is good for Mike Bloomberg considering the fact that he put his name in the ring quite late (Nov, 2019). Others have had a chance to build their ideology, their base in all the time upto November. He had already missed out on quite a few presidential debates which are watched by the entire nation and do create a lot of positive or negative goodwill. So, his team had a lot lesser time to get messages about his ideology, what he stands for in front of the nation.
While everyone has employed a burst spend strategy with a low always on budget, Michael Bloomberg has eclipsed them in their daily always on spend as well as burst spend on Facebook. I am looking forward to how all this will turn up.
Messaging and targeting are key to making a burst spend strategy work
Advertising spend can only work if it is delivering the right message to the right audience at the right time. Spending money to show ads that might not resonate with audience will not work. This is where you need to marry your understanding of audience with the targeting criteria available within the advertising platform and create a message that will resonate with them.
I looked at the ads that the 3 political candidates – Mike Bloomberg, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have running. Their messages, tone and the verbiage are distinctly different.
I am not sure who in them is doing a better job in speaking to their audience but I looked at their ads from the below perspective:
- speaking as a human to audience
- calling out key topics that people care about
- rallying support
Bernie Sanders seems to be winner. His ads use first person language, they talk about varied topics and end every message asking people for support against Trump. His ads call out Trump the most amongst all other candidates. He actually has an ad reflective of his personality with a quote about him – “Bernie is a very rare egg in Washington. He’s honest….He’s not there for Wall Street. He’s not there for Hollywood. He’s not there for big oil, or big pharma or big anybody. Just Big Us. And I’m good with Big Us.” – Tom Blanchard, Clinton, Iowa
Elizabeth Warren needs the maximum work with her ads. They lack creativity and most of her ads have the same imagery of she standing up against the world. They all are related to fundraising with copy like “I’m running to be the best president that money can’t buy. “ There is no mention of causes that she supports. Most of it seems to be about not taking money from billionaires and about how she will be strong against any such people.
Mike Bloomberg’s ads remind me of crisp headlines that Bloomberg news has. His ads have the lowest text count, are the most to the point and speak across many issues. They also refer to him in 3rd person. Interestingly only he has ads running that talk about power of data. That is definitely the first in any presidential election – a candidate talking about the power of data in his/her political ad.
