For the first time in an Australian election we’re able to see exactly where the political parties are targeting some of their ads.
In previous elections we’ve had to piece together an incomplete picture from fragments of ad targeting sent to us by individuals, or hack together databases of political ads by scraping Facebook. Transparency in election advertising is important – collecting and maintaining such an ad database is what allowed us to cover the mediscare campaign in such depth, and reveal how the Coalition was using Facebook ad targeting for its “war on the weekend” campaign.
Now, thanks to data buried within Google’s political transparency report, and with a bit of technical wrangling, we can see where they are pitching their digital campaigns in close to real-time – right down to the postcode.
I’ve written some code that takes the records of Google and YouTube advertising, then converts the geotargeting data into electorates based on the proportion of the electorate’s population covered. This data includes any ads run by a “verified election advertiser” shown on YouTube and Google’s display ad network – so the various text, video and image ads that follow you around the broader internet.
We’ve previously used this to see where the Labor party was targeting its early campaign advertising, but until recently there wasn’t much to see from the federal Liberal party.
That changed on the day before the election campaign was called, when the Liberal party released a slick advertisement titled Scott Morrison: Why I love Australia on YouTube. In the video, soundtracked with emotive orchestral music, Morrison talks about the various disasters that have hit Australia and credits the government’s handling of the pandemic for saving 40,000 lives from Covid.
Here, we can see exactly which electorates were targeted with ads showing this video:
You can use the dropdown on the map to show the targeting of all video ads since the start of the campaign – the Liberal party has added a video ad depicting Anthony Albanese as a weathervane to its roster, and ads spruiking Australia’s economic recovery. This map and the following charts shows the number of unique ads shown to an area – that is, if an electorate had been targeted with both Why I love Australia and the weathervane video, it would have a score of two.
This does not measure the amount of times an ad has been shown nor the ad spend, which is difficult to estimate for each electorate based on Google’s data.
The electorates covered are mostly, as you would expect, marginal – or close to – with a focus on the same seats that have been also been a focus of leader campaigning and election announcements – places such as Gilmore on the New South Wales south coast, Bass and Braddon in Tasmania, and a large number of marginal Queensland electorates.
Notably absent are the seats in which Liberal party politicians are competing against the so-called teal independents, such as Wentworth, Goldstein and Kooyong.
The federal Labor party is targeting similar electorates, with some differences, with the most number of unique video ads being shown in the Western Australian battleground seats of Hasluck, Swan and Pearce and the same marginal Tasmanian seats.
Here you can compare the places both parties are targeting – again, this is only the federal branches of each party. Including the state branches is possible but skews the data towards particularly active states.
And, because I know people will ask, here’s where Clive Palmer’s United Australia party is targeting its advertising:
This won’t be surprising to anyone who has watched TV, walked outside or been anywhere on the internet – Palmer is targeting his ads mostly indiscriminately, and has so far spent at least $14.2m on Google and YouTube ads, many of which are targeted to the entire country or specific states.
He is, however, running one particular campaign which targets specific electorates – this video promising a 20% tax break for people in regional areas is being shown only to those in regional electorates.
If you’re a programmer and interested in helping out to improve the searchable version of Google’s political ad database, please get in touch: nick.evershed@theguardian.com. Similarly, if you’d like to host the data as an online, searchable database or use it for research, the GitHub repo is here
