Full Report
In the lead up to the 2024 US presidential election on Nov. 5, Democratic candidate Kamala Harris’ campaign mentioned the phrase “Donald Trump” more than they did “Kamala Harris” in advertisements that ran on Facebook and Instagram. Meanwhile, ads sponsored by the official campaign for her Republican rival Trump relied heavily on the slogan “Make […] The post What Meta’s Ad Library Shows About Harris and Trump’s Campaigns on Facebook and Instagram appeared first on bellingcat.
Analysis Summary
# Industry News: Political Ad Strategy Insights from Meta's Platform Transparency
## Summary
An analysis of Meta's Ad Library in the lead-up to the 2024 US election reveals distinct digital advertising strategies employed by the campaigns of Kamala Harris and Donald Trump on Facebook and Instagram. The data highlights differences in focus—with Harris's ads emphasizing policy language like "middle class" and "reproductive freedom," while Trump's heavily leveraged the "Make America Great Again" slogan and action-oriented calls-to-action.
## Key Details
- Date: Data analyzed from July 21 to October 30, 2024.
- Companies Involved: Meta (as the platform provider), Kamala Harris Campaign, Donald Trump Campaign.
- Category: Market trend analysis / Digital advertising strategy.
## The Story
Researchers utilized Meta’s public Ad Library to dissect the political advertising strategies of the Harris and Trump campaigns across Facebook and Instagram during a critical pre-election period. The analysis showcased strategic divergence: the Harris campaign used more policy-focused keywords, whereas the Trump campaign centered its messaging around the established "Make America Great Again" brand and driving immediate actions like requesting ballots. The article also serves as a guide, illustrating the methodology for extracting and interpreting this public ad expenditure data, noting the need to search beyond official campaign pages to capture spending by affiliated groups and managing download limitations.
## Business Impact
### For the Companies Involved
- **Meta:** The continued usage and public analysis of the Ad Library underscore the platform's central, yet scrutinzed, role in political discourse and campaign spending, reinforcing the need for robust transparency tools, even as methodology exploration reveals potential limitations in data aggregation for comprehensive oversight.
- **Political Campaigns:** Insights gained from this analysis directly inform ongoing A/B testing and retargeting strategies, confirming which slogans and themes resonate effectively in the digital ad space.
### For Competitors
- Competitors (political and advertising firms) gain essential visibility into the successful messaging frameworks used by front-runners, allowing them to quickly adapt or counter similar digital campaigns.
### For Customers
- Voters are exposed to targeted campaign messaging, with the data suggesting one campaign prioritized substantive discussion while the other prioritized mobilization and established branding.
### For the Market
- This trend reinforces the ongoing shift of significant political advertising budgets toward social media platforms over traditional media, cementing Meta's platforms as indispensable battlegrounds for political influence.
## Technical Implications
The methods detailed highlight the utility of utilizing public APIs/libraries (like Meta's Ad Library) for data scraping and analysis, though it points to technical challenges in tracing **all** spending due to campaign nuances (e.g., ads posted by third-party pages or nuances related to disclaimer searchability). NLP techniques like keyword pairing were central to distinguishing strategic focus.
## Strategic Analysis
- **Market Positioning:** Both campaigns are strategically positioning themselves by tailoring their digital lexicon—Harris emphasizing progressive vision and Trump leveraging established, high-recognition branding.
- **Competitive Advantage:** The advantage goes to the campaign that can most effectively leverage data from these libraries to optimize ad creative and placement in real-time, based on revealed competitor messaging and audience engagement patterns.
- **Challenges:** A key challenge identified is the difficulty in achieving a truly comprehensive view of spending due to the necessity of searching across numerous affiliated pages and filtering disclaimers manually.
## Industry Reactions
- **Analyst Opinions:** Analysts view such transparency tools as vital for democratic integrity, offering data-driven narratives that move beyond anecdotal evidence regarding campaign spending.
- **Expert Commentary:** Experts suggest that while the Ad Library is a strong start, true depth in analysis requires integrating data from Google, X, and niche digital advertising networks.
- **Market Response:** The focus confirms the growing market for political data analytics services that specialize in simplifying the extraction and interpretation of these complex transparency datasets.
## Future Outlook
- We can expect increased development of third-party tools that automate the complex aggregation of ad data across multiple platforms, overcoming the manual limitations described in the article.
- Election monitoring will increasingly rely on such platform data as a primary source for understanding campaign trajectory.
## For Security Professionals
Security professionals focused on misinformation and influence operations must leverage these same transparency tools to monitor for coordinated inauthentic behavior (CIB) hiding behind legitimate advertising facades, paying close attention to spending patterns from non-official or opaque third-party publishers.