Political advertising barometer

election campaign 2022

Jules Rostand, Marion Seigneurin, with the collaboration of Sprint JE, under the coordination of Christine Balagué

As pointed out by Bronner commission report, the algorithmic logic of digital platforms is at the origin of a disruption of the media landscape. At the heart of these mechanisms, the digital advertising participates, through the influence strategies of the various actors, in the creation of opinion. By offering a choice of reading meaningful advertisements and a graphic exploration tool for the themes of the campaign in a complementary way identified on Meta's advertising library, this barometer wishes to participate in the construction of a critical look at the role of digital advertising in the reconfiguration of public debate during the electoral campaign for the presidential election of 2022.

The measurement of advertising intensity

As a first approach to the political advertisements of the campaign, this barometer proposes to compare the weekly evolution of the number, the amount and the impressions of the advertisements. Data from Meta's advertising library, updated weekly, provides a measure of advertising intensity for all campaign themes. Established from world program comparator, the methodology for developing this corpus of advertisements is presented, with its limits, at the end of this page.

Influencing strategies

Critical reading of political communication techniques

By offering a critical reading of a selection of advertisements, this barometer first seeks to show the images and texts at work during the campaign. With the targeting allowed by social networks, these advertisements are not in fact distributed in the same way in the public space but presented to particular socio-demographic groups. Leaving aside the discourse on the veracity of information, the aim here is to show influence strategies card by card, in order to encourage the construction of a critical view of digital advertising.

Influencing strategies

by Théo Mercadal, under the coordination of Jean-Marie John-Mathews

By offering a critical reading of a selection of advertisements, this barometer first seeks to show the images and texts at work during the campaign. With the targeting allowed by social networks, these advertisements are not in fact distributed in the same way in the public space but presented to particular socio-demographic groups. Leaving aside the discourse on the veracity of information, the aim here is to show influence strategies card by card, in order to encourage the construction of a critical view of digital advertising.

Categories of political advertising mechanisms

Critical readings distinguish four categories of political advertising:

political speech : advertisements in this category are at the service of a candidate, a party or a specific theme on which their speech is oriented. This can be direct financing respecting the formal requirement of neutrality of the campaign as in the case of La République en Marche (sheet n°1) or indirect financing, in which the advertiser supports the propagation of the candidate's speech.

social advocacy :
this category refers to associations and institutions appealing to the electorate of candidates for the presidential election, in order to publicize their cause. These advertisements are characterized by an appeal to all candidates, or at least to a diversity of them. The advertiser targets people according to socio-demographic characteristics that they consider close to them, as does the One association on poverty (sheet n°2).

public rumor : these are advertisements highlighting information that is not referenced, or contextualized or viewed critically. These advertisements are part of a gray area close to disinformation, marked in particular by the spread of conspiratorial remarks, as the Sum of Us association was able to do (sheet n°3).

business logic : advertisements aimed at supporting a business model make up the latter category. These are mainly announcements financed by the actors of the public debate, the main media (cf. sheet n°6 on Release) to certain film producers, whose activity is constructed in response to the political situation. This category more generally contains advertisements that take advantage of the campaign for the benefit of a commercial activity.

Campaign themes

Representation of the most cited campaign themes in advertising

The official campaign period opened on March 11, with the release of the official list of candidates for the presidential election by the Constitutional Council. During this period, any communication of an electoral propaganda nature, including online advertising and on social networks, is strictly prohibited (Articles L48-1, L52-1, L52-4, L52-8 of the Electoral Code). However, public debate continues through the ability of political actors to impose their discourse. In this context, this barometer shows each week the themes of the campaign on which advertising focuses.

Campaign themes

Representation of the most cited campaign themes in advertising

The official campaign period opened on March 11, with the release of the official list of candidates for the presidential election by the Constitutional Council. During this period, any communication of an electoral propaganda nature, including online advertising and on social networks, is strictly prohibited (Articles L48-1, L52-1, L52-4, L52-8 of the Electoral Code). However, public debate continues through the ability of political actors to impose their discourse. In this context, this barometer shows each week the themes of the campaign on which advertising focuses.

Chronicle of campaign themes

● Following the second round of the presidential election, in the week of April 25 to May 1, the last period of our study, we find a greater dispersion of expenses, outside the communities of interest identified since the start of the campaign. Compared to previous weeks, a significant number of top fundraising pages fall outside communities of interest. This is particularly the case ofAPF France Handicap with over €2,000 in average ad spend or Action Against Hunger (France) with nearly €2,500 over the week. This revival of advertising investment in alternative communication themes on the part of NGOs could be the sign of the closure of a news sequence. With the end of the presidential campaign, social actors are thus seizing more media space, which allows them to highlight their subjects in all their diversity. This new vitality is also visible in online advertising metrics, where the number of advertisements, online communication budgets and platform impressions are once again on the rise. Beyond this hypothesis of a renewal of political advertising, the second major phenomenon of this week following the presidential election is the displacement of the European Parliament from the community of interest on Europe to that of Ukraine. This testifies to the essential place occupied by Ukraine in the public communication of the institution since the beginning of the war. These two communities of interest have been particularly close since the beginning of our analysis, with a large number of pages at the intersection of these two sets. This passage of the European Parliament, one of the most influential political advertisers on Meta platforms with €75,000 in budget, is the most eloquent sign of this rapprochement.
The week of April 18 to 24 leading up to the second round of the presidential election is characterized by a reduction of more than half in the number of impressions compared to the previous week. Despite this reduction in the audience, the number and amount of advertisements viewed remains stable, which can be explained by the decline in public interest for a second round where uncertainty gives way to the return of the poster of 2017. The financing of advertisements by advertisers decreased much less markedly, and even maintained its internal dynamic. We thus observe the appearance of advertisements from professional organisations, such as those of the National Council of the Order of Midwives which calls for better recognition of this profession and some Federation of Individual Employers of France which seeks, by using the potentialities of the geographical targeting proposed by Meta, to encourage vocations to become industrial advisers in this field. Biodiversity also appears for the first time in the most quoted words of campaign advertisements, led in particular by Greenpeace's call to vote against Marine Le Pen, distributed almost exclusively to 25-34 year olds. This theme is taken up by other environmental protection associations, such as the Alliance for the preservation of forests, but also by local political institutions, such as the page of the town halls of the 6th and 8th arrondissements of Marseille. This revival of local players can be found in all the themes of the campaign, with advertisements from the Hérault department on culture and those of the Bastide district in Bordeaux on CO2. With the approach of the legislative elections, it may be a question of putting forward an assessment and putting back at the center of the concerns closer to daily life. Beyond the national context, the war in Ukraine continues to feature prominently in political ads. The actors position themselves on all aspects of the conflict, monitoring of the situation by the Ukrainian News page to virtual house project for Ukrainians at the international university campus in Paris. Far from being just citizens, the mobilizations of certain institutions, such as the NGO Aide et Action on the education of children, are based on engagement techniques developed within agencies specializing in this field, such as Hopening or mind.me. For these organizations relying on donations, advertising is a key issue in the development and pursuit of their actions.
● At the heart of the between-two-towers, in
the week of April 11 to 17, voting instructions for the second round appear in political advertisements. Beyond the declarations of political and trade union leaders, we observe the open positioning of actors in the public space, media like Technikart Magazine in favor of Emmanuel Macron in support of Marine Le Pen displayed in a page created immediately after the first round by an activist user. Far from being satisfied with the face-to-face offered by the second round, political advertisements testify to the dissatisfaction with regard to the voting system expressed in the electorate on the left, visible for example through promotion by "Le Clairon de l'Atax", an online newspaper from Aude at the confidential hearing, of a petition making it possible to count the possible “rejection votes” in favor of the presidential candidate. Echoing the divisions of the electorate of Jean-Luc Mélenchon on this point, the citizen use of the petition is thus frequently doubled by a promotion by online advertising, as highlighted the call for a white vote of an eponymous page. Beyond these new actors on the margins of the public space, we observe the emergence, among the most central themes in online advertising, of the theme of education. Mainly carried by international institutions and NGOs, these advertisements seek to mobilize public opinion for the future of children, in the face of the war in Ukraine for UNICEF and more generally in the face of conflicts in the world for Help and Action. Far from being the reflection of a single tragedy of the war, the emergence of the theme of education implicitly signals an increased mobilization on the part of progressive actors. This mobilization on this theme dear to the left is thus manifested in the actions of the collective of the Pact of the power to live, as an extension of their questioning of candidates for the campaign, but also in more personal political commitment, such as that of Mathilde Vermer, coming from literature. Despite its richness, however, the dive into the ads of the week is indicative of the limits of the categorizations made by Meta in its advertising library. The announcements of films showing at Le Brady cinema club, in Paris, were thus described as political advertisements by the platform – and censored as a result. At the same time, major media announcements about the campaign, from Monde to Figaro, continue to be broadcast on the platform, without any warning or transparency on their budgets and their audiences.
In the week leading up to the first round of the presidential election, Sunday, April 10, voting is twice as commonly quoted in political ads. In this field, we observe a number of new players, such as Ichtus France for the defense of the social doctrine of the Church and the Camp des Milles in the fight against the extreme right. In this excitement, the Amplify France page, studied in our sheet of the week, represents a textbook case of the gray zone around political advertising, by financing major advertisements against the vote in favor of Marine Le Pen. With the result of the election, the reaction of certain political actors is immediate, such as the Union Syndicale Solidaires, which finances the distribution of its press release using Jean-Luc Mélenchon's formula: “not a vote for the far right”. Beyond the political discourse, the public debate around the presidential campaign is also the place for commercial proposals, as for the Hélios bank, which boasts of its ecological commitment and for Sciences Po Executive Education, which highlights the topicality of the work of its researchers. More than ever, online advertising is a crucial battleground for political and social actors, like the advertisement of the very recent page (created on April 3) "Freedom Embassy" recalling, against the rhetoric of the Kremlin, the aggression of Ukraine by Russia.
● One week before the first round of the presidential election,
during the week of March 28 to April 2, the themes of the campaign are becoming more diversified. In particular, we observe the appearance of the theme of the end of life, with positions in favor of euthanasia like those defending a Christian anthropological perspective. The question of the vote takes a place at the center of the debate, invested by specialized social actors such as the NGO Voted. This theme crosses the entire cultural field, where we can see Têtu magazine promote its content around Christiane Taubira's vote. The highlighting of the strategy of influence of these different actors, proposed in particular in last week's analysis sheet on the publicity of the Republic in March, makes it possible to better understand the diversity of the springs behind the appearance of this theme at the heart of the words of the campaign.
● Without this centrality of the Russian invasion being contradicted, the third week of this barometer, from March 21 to 27, sees the emergence of new actors, such as
the France at the Urnes page calling for voting in the presidential election commented above, as well as the new rail theme, with the concomitance of the official SNCF communication on the ecological virtues of the train and the the strike call relayed by the CGT Facebook page.
The week of March 14 to 20, is marked with a increasing the position of the war in Ukraine within the words of the campaign, these two terms representing more than 60% of the links.
● 
The first week of study of this barometer, from March 7 to 13, highlights the importance of Ukraine in advertisements on campaign themes. The theme of war represents nearly half of the links between advertisers. The Boyd Branden Page (since deleted) calling for the armed mobilization of volunteers against the Russian invasion, broadcast in English, stands out this week by the importance of its advertising expenditure.

From construction to reading graphs

This barometer seeks to show the actors who participate through their advertisements in the creation of public opinion. From a lexicon of campaign words, made on the basis of the comparator of newspaper programs the Monde, these graphs present, each week, the network of pages on the Meta platforms (Facebook and Instagram) that communicate these campaign words. These pages, which represent the nodes of the network, are linked together by the fact of having purchased, at least once over the period, an advertisement on the same theme. In other words, this means that two pages are linked together when the same keyword from the list has been identified in all the advertisements they finance over the week. The links that are displayed in color are thus, in the proportion indicated by the caption, the most cited keywords in the advertisements. This makes it possible to build an indicator of the centrality of the words of the campaign in the advertising panorama.

Campaign Word Study Methodology

Introduction

The study of campaign themes is based on attention to the vocabulary of candidates and parties, to their discourse. This study, to which history and political science are particularly attentive, opens up to new fields. Thus, from the interwar period to contemporary presidents, the discourse of left and right has been finely analyzed by Damond Mayaffre.1 With the tools of logometry supported by artificial intelligence, he even managed to produce a prediction of Emmanuel Macron's campaign speech, in a book released on May 6, 2021.2

This attention to the verb has been brought to social networks, where the ability of each of the political actors to make their speech flourish has become essential. The research team ofInstitute of Complex Systems, led by David Chavalarias, carries this study in particular on Twitter, through the publication of a online barometer to follow the evolution of the terms of the campaign. Beyond the only quantitative approaches, it is an exercise that Béatrice Bouniol and Emmanuel Laurentin also engage in once a month, respectively for the newspaper La Croix and the show Debate time on France Culture.

As part of this attention to political discourse, advertising, a source of remuneration and a major means of dissemination for content creators publishing on online platforms, plays a central role. By seizing the ability to reach and profile users of online platforms, political and social actors are making use of extremely powerful communication techniques, particularly criticized during recent election campaigns in the United States..3

In France, political advertising is extremely regulated, the Electoral Code prohibiting the use of these platforms for the promotion of programs and candidates (art. L52-1). Online disinformation has also been taken over by associations and journalists, and even taken to the institutional level by theObservatory of initiatives to combat disinformation (ODIL). In the context of the 2022 presidential campaign, the collective CheckFirst, born at the start of the pandemic to fight against disinformation on Covid-19, offers a platform for studying political advertisements linked to candidates: https://22vlalapub.fr/.

In this rich context, this analysis proposes to defocus the gaze on the candidates to focus instead on the words of online advertising, as they are expressed on the ads purchased from the main American platforms. By following up on the explorations carried out in this area by https://22vlalapub.fr/, it is a question here of establishing a follow-up, during the campaign itself, of the evolution and the distribution of the themes on which the advertisers communicate. The objective of this research in itinere is to make known the actors of political advertising, as well as to better show the dynamics of the campaign.


Sources and methods

This research is based on Meta's advertising libraries, including theAPI Ad Library allows a thorough and controlled study. Google and Snapchat also offer an API to access their data, but do not provide easy access to the actual content of these advertisements. Advertising data from TikTok and LinkedIn is only accessible via a graphical interface. Political advertisements being finally banned on Twitter, following the American presidential campaign, they are not subject by law to the disclosure of their advertisements.


Establishment of the corpus

The realization of this research involves the construction of a corpus of advertisements. To do this, it was chosen not to be limited to the categories offered by Meta, which itself offers a field of political advertising. On the contrary, the choice was made to define a lexicon of words from the presidential campaign, capable of controlling the construction of this corpus.

In order to study the themes of the campaign, it is a question of obtaining a general view of the advertisements of a political nature, independently of the positions of their author. The lexicon chosen for this is based on the categories developed by Le Monde, in the comparator of the programs of the presidential candidates of 2022 carried out by the political service and the decoders. This large-scale work, whose methodology is presented online, made it possible to identify 120 themes on which the debate is being played out between the candidates. From this data, graciously made available by Le Monde to the Good in Tech Chair, a list of 157 keywords was established, making it possible to identify the main points of each of the themes identified by Le Monde.


Data collection and processing

The data is collected by Quentin Michaud, engineering student at Télécom Sud Paris, as part of a partnership with Sprint JE.

Meta's advertising library for advertisements with social, electoral or political stakes in France is accessible at the address: https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/?active_status=all&ad_type=political_and_issue_ads&country=FR&media_type=all. If the manual search is accessible without registering, the query by API requires creating a Meta-verified developer account. It is then necessary to create a developer project and generate a token to be able to connect.

Requests on the API make it possible to obtain, for each list of keywords submitted, a JSON table describing all the advertisements corresponding to at least one of these terms. As the requests may eventually return access to another API link allowing you to retrieve the rest of the results, it may be necessary to access the following link in a loop until you have retrieved all the data.

This data is then transformed, in order to obtain a format suitable for automated processing.


Construction of indicators and graph analysis

From this data, a set of indicators is constructed. First, the intervals offered by Meta for ad spend and ad impression statistics are transformed to obtain an average value. The advertisements are then aggregated by date of creation on the advertising library, in order to obtain a measurement of the advertising intensity in progress, in number, in expenditure and in circulation.
In addition to these quantitative indicators, the themes and words of the campaign are studied through a graph analysis. For each platform, the nodes correspond to an advertiser. A link is not an advertisement but, for two advertisers, the fact of having purchased at least once an advertisement on the same theme, that is to say identified in the data collected by the same keyword.

Study limitations

Although this approach makes it possible to build a tool for exploring political advertisements during the campaign, it nevertheless has a certain number of limits. The first of these limits is related to the choice of the corpus, which is based on the translation into keywords of the themes of Le Monde. The second limit is due to the nature of the corpus itself, which is based on the quality of Meta data, which is more complete and more accessible than that of other platforms, as noted by the Conseil Supérieur de l'Audiovisuel.4 Although having a greater depth, Meta data does have its shortcomings, the delays in making newly created advertisements available can in particular exceed several days, which can lead to the graphs published each week not being perfectly exhaustive. Finally, the most important limitation relates to semantics. The terms in the list naturally have several meanings depending on their context of utterance, which may lead this analysis to include advertisements that are not part of the political debate, such as for example a call to vote for the election of mutualist delegates of Solimut Mutuelle France. This leads the estimation of advertising intensity to be potentially overestimated and the graphs to present irrelevant pages.


Bibliography

Superior Audiovisual Council (CSA), “Political advertising on social networks: CSA study of the advertising library of the Facebook platform”, Focus - CSA Collections, Paris, 2020, https://www.csa.fr/Informer/Collections-du-CSA/Focus-Toutes-les-etudes-et-les-comptes-rendus-synthetiques-proposant-un-zoom-sur-un-sujet-d-actualite/La-publicite-politique-sur-les-reseaux-sociaux-etude-du-CSA-de-la-bibliotheque-publicitaire-de-la-plateforme-Facebook.
Erika Franklin Fowler et alii, « Online Political Advertising in the United States », in Joshua A. Tucker and Nathaniel Persily (dir.), Social Media and Democracy: The State of the Field, Prospects for Reform, Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2020, p. 111‑138, https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/social-media-and-democracy/online-political-advertising-in-the-united-states/98F09A1F61A67819A70C22920BE4674D.
Damon Mayaffre, Macron ou le mystère du verbe, L’Aube, 2021, 342 pages, https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-03213558.
Damon Mayaffre, « Du candidat au président. Panorama logométrique de François Hollande », Mots: les langages du politique, n° 112, ENS Éditions (Lyon), 2016, p. 81‑92, DOI: 10.4000/mots.22479.
Damon Mayaffre, The weight of words. The discourse of left and right in the interwar period. Maurice Thorez, Léon Blum, Pierre-Etienne Flandin and André Tardieu (1928-1939), Honoré Champion, 2000, https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01364904.

  1. Damon Mayaffre, The weight of words. The discourse of left and right in the interwar period. Maurice Thorez, Léon Blum, Pierre-Etienne Flandin and André Tardieu (1928-1939), Honoré Champion, 2000 ; Damon Mayaffre, « Du candidat au président. Panorama logométrique de François Hollande », Mots: les langages du politique, n° 112, ENS Éditions (Lyon), 2016, p. 81‑92.↩︎

  2. Damon Mayaffre, Macron ou le mystère du verbe, L’Aube, 2021, 342 pages.↩︎

  3. Erika Franklin Fowler et alii, « Online Political Advertising in the United States », in Joshua A. Tucker and Nathaniel Persily (dir.), Social Media and Democracy: The State of the Field, Prospects for Reform, Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2020, p. 111‑138.↩︎

  4. Superior Audiovisual Council (CSA), “Political advertising on social networks: CSA study of the advertising library of the Facebook platform”, Focus - CSA Collections, Paris, 2020, par. 3.3, p. 14-16.↩︎