Same Message, Thousands of Times: Targeted Facebook Advertising by British Parties at the 2017 and 2019 General Elections

What did British parties say in their targeted Facebook ads, how often did they say it, and what did they spend? I combine three sources from the 2017 and 2019 general elections: 550 ads that I hand-coded for tone, topic and the people they featured (157 from 2017 and 393 from 2019); the 20,135 ads that the main party and leader pages started on Facebook between the dissolution of Parliament and 9 December 2019; and the daily spending reported in Facebook's Ad Library Report, with Snapchat and Google spending for comparison. Labour's party, leader and candidate pages spent most on Facebook and Instagram in the 2019 campaign, between £1.00 million on the days the report covers and about £1.32 million once five missing days are filled, ahead of the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives (up to about £0.9 million each). The Conservatives concentrated their ads on very few messages: they started 9,137 ads using 452 distinct texts, but one text accounted for 2,479 ads and five texts for 63% of all their ads, launched mostly in the first four days of December. The Liberal Democrats ran 7,930 ads from 174 texts. Labour and the Brexit Party spread their ads across many more messages. Within Labour, the top tenth of ads took about four-fifths of the estimated spend. In the coded samples, attacks on a rival leader appeared in more ads in 2019 than in 2017, but that rise came from the Brexit Party, almost all of whose ads attacked Jeremy Corbyn. Within the parties that advertised in both elections, attacks did not rise, and on a stricter definition they fell. Targeted advertising in 2019 was dominated by a small set of slogans, each run in hundreds or thousands of ads.