Digital consultants’ anxiety about the midterms ratcheted up this week after news broke about Facebook’s plans to “de-emphasize political posts” in users’ News Feeds.
While the move could affect political publishers more than campaigns and groups, it still caused anxiety amongst practitioners given it followed another story that the company was exploring forming an election commission of academics and policy wonks to advise on “global election-related matters.”
“Some of that is always a symptom that you get after a presidential election year — [users] just want a break from it all,” said Katie Harbath, who spent a decade at Facebook’s DC office before launching her firm Anchor Change. She noted that Facebook made similar moves in 2017 following the bitterly fought 2016 presidential cycle.
“What we’ve heard so far, both about the election commission as well as this [News Feed change], shows that Facebook is exploring how they want to define their role in the space … For practitioners, they need to know soon what these rules are going to be for 2022. Hopefully, that’s a lesson that Facebook has taken to heart.”
The initial reaction to the news about how Facebook treats political content was greeted with concern from practitioners that C&E spoke with.
“They’re actually making the problem worse, rather than making it better,” said Beth Becker, a Democratic digital consultant.
That’s because by de-emphasizing political content in the News Feed, officeholders and even campaigns trying to counter disinformation will have a harder time reaching audiences on the platform.
“It makes it harder to fight back,” Becker said. “The answer is, you ban the bad actors, you kick them off the platform.”
Now, digital consultants are already looking at other ways to get their clients’ messages out next cycle. But while practitioners say they’re exploring other avenues, that won’t change who the two-top platforms are when it comes to political digital marketing.
“The first place you’re going to go to reach a lot of people quickly to raise money or put out GOTV messaging is probably either Google or Facebook, and you’re still going to do both,” said Andrew Eldredge-Martin, founder of Measured Campaigns. “From a paid media perspective, we’re going to be on those platforms. And we’re going to be on connected TV, and programmatic and programmatic display. We’re going to be everywhere.”
Something likely to see more ad dollars is search because of the complex issues that will be associated with the 2022 midterms — namely, the $1 billion infrastructure bill — and the changing voting rules in different states.
Now, Eldredge-Martin noted how hard it is even for congressional campaigns to run effective search programs around things like the infrastructure bill because of the investment of staff and money required. But for local campaigns that don’t have national support from big-spending groups, search will be an important tool for mobilizing voters.
“On the local level, individual candidates, individual races, I think it could be more important — especially in regions and states where you don’t have national groups coming in.
“You’re the only one guiding them to come out,” Eldredge-Martin added. “Search is absolutely a place that you need to be because people are going to have questions [about voting] and they’re not going to find information as easily as say, if you’er in Pennsylvania where there’s a big investment.”
One thing campaigns need to keep in mind when it comes to search advertising related to voting and turnout is that they can easily check to see if other allied groups are already spending around the same terms.
“Maybe one of the Senate campaigns is already out there communicating on these search terms. If that’s the case, you don’t have to recreate the wheel,” said Eldredge-Martin.
