Political advertising on Facebook: Campaign strategies deployed by major political parties in the UK

As online political advertising constitutes a significant portion of campaign expenditure in many countries, it is crucial to explore how this element of online communications is utilised by political actors in their campaigns. While previous studies have delved into strategies in online campaign messages (Borah, 2016), such as emotional appeals and functional purposes like acclaim, attack, and defense, little research has focused on the utilisation of online political advertising within campaign strategies. We argue that it is important to investigate the use of online paid advertising in political campaigns for two reasons. First, social media has presented political campaigners with a range of possibilities to achieve various goals, whereas there is limited understanding of the use of paid advertising compared to organic online activities such as public posts. Second, as emphasised by Kreiss et al. (2018), there is a need for research to explore ‘how campaigns take up platforms in the service of their electoral goals as part of a broader, integrated communications strategy.’ In this paper, we aim to advance our understanding of the role online political advertising plays in campaign activities by addressing three questions: 1) What are the goals of political parties’ online advertising activity? 2) Which policy issues do party accounts address most often in their paid advertising? 3) Does negative campaigning persist over time? We utilise data from the Meta ad archive to investigate the paid ads placed on Facebook by three major UK political parties: the Labour party, the Conservative party, and the Liberal Democrats. The data covers a period of five years from December 1, 2018 to December 1, 2023, with a total of 5,044 unique ads placed by major political parties in the UK. Our analysis, based on a content analysis of these ads, seeks to identify the primary objectives, policy relevance, and the presence of negative campaigning in the online advertising activities of political campaigners. By doing so, we aim to offer the first holistic study of campaign strategies on Facebook deployed by major political parties in the UK.