A while back, some clever political types figured out how to run political advertising for free in Canada.

They would “leak” their ad to journalists, who would then write stories about the ad or, even better, run the ad on TV or radio or a newspaper website. If the ad got lots of coverage, there was no need to take the next step and actually buy advertising space on TV or in newspapers.

It took a while, but most of us in the media have now wised up and politely tell the political-ad purveyors that we’ll do stories on the ads when they are actually advertisements — meaning, something they have paid to publicize.

It will be interesting to see how we handle this situation when political advertising moves to the next frontier, namely Facebook, which is holding an event in Ottawa on Feb. 18 in a bid to play a big part in the epic ad war expected in this year’s federal election.

A couple of months ago in the U.S., BuzzFeed’s editor-in-chief predicted that Facebook — not TV — would be the main advertising battleground by next year.

“Facebook is on the cusp — and I suspect 2016 will be the year this becomes clear — of replacing television advertising as the place where American elections are fought and won,” Ben Smith wrote.

Facebook Canada isn’t reaching that far for Election 2015 in this country. “We’re ambitious, but we’re not that ambitious,” says Kevin Chan, head of public policy for Facebook in Canada.

The Facebook folks are going into the Feb. 18 Ottawa event brandishing a case study from John Tory’s mayoralty campaign in Toronto last year.

At first glance, Tory wouldn’t seem like a poster boy for Facebook-style campaigning. His “likes” and the comments on his Facebook page lagged far behind Olivia Chow (who would have won, hands-down, if Facebook engagement translated into votes: 64,000-plus fans at the time of the Oct. 27 vote, compared to about 10,000 for Tory and fewer than 8,000 for Doug Ford.)

Tory’s campaign is being held up, though, as an example of how to use Facebook for advertising, specifically, gadgets such as “custom” and “lookalike” audiences. Facebook, unlike TV, can fine-tune ad delivery to only show up on the eyeballs of target audiences. In Tory’s case, for instance, the campaign directed its ads at Facebook users 45 and older in Toronto, and then went looking to advertise among people who shared the same interests or attributes as other Tory supporters.

Tory’s digital campaign director, Alex Blumenstein, agrees that Facebook will eventually eclipse TV advertising in elections. He calls it “a great way for candidates to fish where their fish are . . . It’s much less labour intensive than knocking on doors to find your voters.” (Though you should still knock on doors, Blumenstein hastens to add.)

“Where the fish are” is an interesting phrase. It’s sometimes quaint to see how elections are still cast — largely in the media — as earnest conversations between would-be candidates and attentive audiences sitting in community halls, or leaders giving big speeches in crowded arenas.

The people at those events, where they still exist (and we’ve all noticed the rooms getting smaller over the past decade or two) already know how they’re going to vote. The real arts of campaign persuasion are devoted to finding the people who aren’t paying that much attention to politics.

Apparently you can find such people on Facebook. When Chan talks to the politicos in Ottawa, he’ll be telling them that an estimated 15 million Canadians log on to Facebookdaily; slightly more than the 14.8 million who voted in 2011.

If politicians are feeling the lure of Facebook for the coming election, that tells us a lot about how political campaigning has evolved in this country.

When politics is about mass marketing, as it always used to be, TV or newspapers were the best place for ads. As vote-seeking has begun to revolve around micro-targeting, as it has in recent years, the political pros have been devising all kinds of ways to reach only the strategic slices of the electorate needed to sway their fortunes.

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In the U.S., the Washington Post also has predicted that Facebook’s dominance in politics is “not as far in the future as you might think.” With so much traffic already between Canadian and U.S. campaign techniques, this year’s federal election in Canada may be a sneak preview.

Meanwhile, we in the media will have to figure out, once again, how to cover an ad campaign that the politicians haven’t paid our outlets to publicize. If we’re only waiting by the TV to watch the expected ad war for election 2015, moreover, we may have our eyes on the wrong screen.

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