The Albanese government is targeting Australian women with a social media advertising campaign in the lead-up to the budget, albeit with a more muted effort than in years past.
Compared with the Coalition government’s big cash-splash campaigns for the past few budgets, the Labor government is running a more restrained campaign for its first full-year federal budget according to Meta’s advertising library.
Digital advertising on platforms like Facebook allows advertisers to micro-target messages to specific demographics, whereas organic posts from Facebook pages typically reach an account’s existing audience.
The federal government is running a stripped-down campaign through Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s Facebook page, which is promoting six policies already announced from the budget: reduced medicine costs, more urgent care clinics, an increase in the number of fee-free TAFE places, expanded parental leave, the National Anti-Corruption Commission (NACC) and the school student free broadband plan.
Advertisements for each policy except for the NACC are predominantly being shown to women. Of these, ads about urgent care clinics, medicines prices and fee-free TAFE places are mostly targeted towards women over 35, whereas ads for paid parental leave are mostly targeted at women between 18-35.
In contrast with previous pre-budget campaigns, these advertisements are exclusively about specific policies and not posts about broader political messages or featuring specific politicians. Additionally, these have been run through the prime minister’s Facebook page and not through the treasurer’s.
Albanese’s page has spent just $893 on advertisements in the two weeks leading up to the budget. (An imperfect but still helpful comparison: the Labor Party spent more than $100,000 on ads in the week after last year’s federal budget.)
Other political parties have also shown little interest in pre-budget digital advertising campaigns. Accounts for the Liberal Party, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton and opposition Treasury spokesman Angus Taylor haven’t run any advertisements. The Nationals Party is running advertisements about its opposition to the Voice to Parliament.
The only significant political group running a campaign is the Greens, which has spent $11,432 in the past week to promote posts about a national rent freeze and a JobSeeker increase.
