The Liberal Party of Canada (PLC) and the Conservative Party of Canada (CCP) continue to send thousands of dollars a week to the California platform Facebook in exchange for visibility, shows a compilation of data carried out by The duty over the past year.
“Should all liberal mandates be stopped? The rhetorical question is posed in English in a sponsored Facebook post soliciting donations to the CCP. The message would have appeared on more than 250,000 Canadian screens between July 13 and August 2. The bill: around $3,000.
Outside the election period, the official opposition Conservatives spend the most on advertising on Facebook and Instagram, with an average of $4,042 per week. Second, the Liberal Party in power pays a weekly average of $3,030 to the multinational Meta for this same service.
To a lesser extent, the New Democratic Party (NDP) and the Bloc Québécois also continued to pay Facebook after the end of the last election campaign on September 20. They paid $423 and $36 per week on average, respectively. The Green Party of Canada and the People’s Party of Canada did not lend themselves to the game.
Canadian political parties are important customers of Facebook, especially during election campaigns. Promoting Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s page alone cost nearly $175,000 each week of the 2021 election campaign. That’s more than spending the rest of the year ($140,000 ) for the Liberal Party page and its leader’s page combined.
As revealed The duty last September, the PLC was the party that spent the most on advertising on this social network during the five weeks of the last election campaign, with a total of $3.6 million — a significant part of the approximately $8 million spent by all parties combined in view of the ballot.
The company Meta, owner of Facebook and Instagram, keeps a register of all the political ads it broadcasts in Canada, going beyond its strict obligation to do so during an election campaign. A tightening of the rules in 2018 drove all its competitors out of this market during an election period.
Up to $15,000 per week
After the victory of the Liberal Party in the last election, on September 20, 2021, the political parties have all radically reduced their advertising expenditure on the Web.
They continued to send Meta collectively between $5,000 and $15,000 a week most of the time, however, as shown by the compilation of data posted weekly in Facebook’s “ads library.”
A wave of spending was observed around mid-December 2021; another at the end of February 2022. The first moment coincides in the news with a Liberal Party fundraising campaign and the unveiling by the government of an update economic. The second corresponds to the opposition’s criticisms of the Emergencies Act and the federal pre-budget consultations.
“It’s another good indicator that we’re still campaigning. The parties now are always campaigning between elections, between key votes, like what is done in the United States,” believes Mireille Lalancette, full professor of political communication at the University of Quebec to Trois-Rivieres.
Since 85% of the population is on Facebook, the expert points out, the parties prefer to target their audience there rather than display advertisements in traditional media. Moreover, in a minority government situation, the parties would feel a greater need to show their achievements throughout the mandate. And this, despite the agreement initialed by the PLC and the NDP to keep the current government in place until 2025.
“We see that the parties are always either proactive, to show what they are doing, or in reaction, therefore in criticizing the party in power. »
Survey social networks
Former digital strategist for the Liberal Party of Canada during the 2015 and 2019 campaigns, Sébastien Fassier is not surprised by the parties’ continued advertising investments on social media. “You have continuous fundraising campaigns in political parties,” explains the man who is now vice-president of the public relations firm TACT.
In addition to soliciting donations as a philanthropy campaign or traditional commercial advertising would, political parties can learn valuable insights from online campaigns. “Beyond the immediate aspect of fundraising, there is the objective of updating the databases on the major centers of interest, explains Sébastien Fassier. Online marketing makes it possible to see if such an issue resonates better in such a region, etc. »
At the beginning of August, the Conservative Party abandoned its message on mandates related to the COVID-19 pandemic. After a few commercials about the lack of competition in the telecommunications sector, the political party is promoting publications this week about its opposition to the Liberal greenhouse gas reduction target associated with fertilizers. The bill: over $700.
With Denise Ledoux