Targeting

#45: Facebook Ads Transparency in the Irish Abortion Referendum, with Craig Dwyer

April 22, 2018 Digital Strategists

Craig Dwyer, co-founder of the Transparent Referendum Initiative, discusses targeted Facebook advertising ahead of the Irish constitutional referendum about abortion on May 25th. The TRI collects “dark” Facebook posts and is building an openly accessible database of targeted political ads. We discuss some of the major issues surrounding the referendum, the difficulties in discerning when a Facebook ad is “political,” and targeted political advertising on other platforms like Google and Youtube.

The Medium post mentioned in the episode.

ForaChange: Craig’s digital campaigning toolkit.

#27: Who’s Targeting You? Facebook Dark Ads in the British Election Campaign, with Sam Jeffers

June 25, 2017 Digital Strategists

In this episode, Sam Jeffers, co-founder of Who Targets Me, joins the podcast to discuss how sponsored Facebook ads were used by political parties in the 2017 British General Election. Who Targets Me is a project collecting targeted Facebook ads via a Google Chrome extension, and its aim is to shed light on who’s posting political dark ads as well as who’s being targeted. We discuss the project and what the initial data shows from GE2017.

#24: Donald Trump and Scott Walker’s Digital Strategy on Social Media, with Matthew Oczkowski

May 29, 2017 Digital Strategists

Matthew Oczkowski, (former) Head of Product at Cambridge Analytica, joins the show to discuss his experience heading digital strategy for the Scott Walker primary campaign and Donald Trump general election. We discuss how the candidates used Snapchat and other social media, the differences between primary and general election campaigning in terms of digital strategy and marketing, and we also discuss how microtargeting works in practice.

This episode was featured in the Financial Times and American Majority.