In 2016, after Trump won the election, Mark Zuckerberg called the Trump team on its innovative, test-oriented ad campaign.

TEST, LEARN, ADAPT

Trump’s campaign presented many ideas and it let them fail quickly, adhering to the ones that found resonance and resiliency – ‘this message sticks’. It’s a strategy that amplifies intimacy with the prospect voter, ‘We hear you‘.

DISRUPTING THE ORTHODOXY

Trump ads disrupted Democrat and Republican establishment ‘orthodoxy’ by keeping its targets (GOP primary competitors and then Hillary) boxed into defending excessive issues where party voters are vulnerable to straying, forcing the campaigns to use ads agitating the bottom, nucleus, of their base voter support and creating opportunities for the unwieldy bureaucracy of his opponents to make mistakes and allocate resources on no yield, ‘plug the hole’ fast response teams. (John Robb covered this extensively in 2015/2016)

Trump ads interacted with the ideal prospect voters, incentivizing their own innovation to spread new ideas across the mass of his ‘voting insurgencies’ of otherwise dormant potential voters.

Brad Parscale, Trump campaign media manager, said  on 60 Minutes that the site obsessively tested ad creative and messaging — up to 100,000 different versions per day of different ads. That involved “changing language, words, colors, changing things because certain people like a green button better than a blue button,” outlining the automated alterations that were made to spit out different versions of an ad. “Some people like the word ‘donate’ or ‘contribute.’”

TRUMP V CLINTON AD STATS

• Trump ran 5.9 million different versions of ads during the presidential campaign and rapidly tested them to spread those that generated the most Facebook engagement.
• Clinton ran 66,000 different kinds of ads in the same period.
• 28% of Trump’s ad spending was tied to third-party data files on voters, and leveraged a FB tool that helped the campaign show ads to lookalike audiences.

When you use a LOOKALIKE audience, your ad is delivered to that audience of people who are similar to (or "look like") your existing customers.

You can use a percent range to choose how closely you want your new audience to match your source audience. The size you choose depends on your goals. Smaller percentages more closely match your source audience, but larger percentages create a bigger, broader audience.

• Clinton’s ads aimed for broader audiences, with only 4% of her Facebook spend on the lookalike tool
• 84% of Trump’s budget asked people on Facebook to take an action, like donating, compared with 56% of Clinton’s.

“Both campaigns spent heavily on Facebook between June and November of 2016” citing revenue of $44M for Trump and $28M for Clinton. “But Trump’s Facebook campaigns were more complex than Clinton’s and better leveraged FB’s ability to optimize for outcomes.”

DESANTIS TWITTER ADS

These Twitter ads are recent. I spaced them out a few days so we can probe which strategy they are applying, Trump v Clinton

DESANTIS AD 1

Tweet 

LINK OPENS UP TO

DESANTIS AD 2

DESANTIS TWITTER AD OPENS UP TO

DESANTIS AD 3

DESANTIS TWITTER AD OPENS UP TO (I SHIT YOU NOT, I ONLY ATTACHED FIRST 3 IMAGES SCROLLING DOWN, IT GOES ON FOR ANOTHER 5 IMAGES SCROLLING DOWN, AND ITS ALL ON ONE PAGE)