If you lived in north-east Iowa, the evangelical stronghold where the battle for the soul of conservative American politics will play out in person on Monday, and happened to have given Senator Ted Cruz’s campaign your email address sometime in the last few months, you might find something especially appealing this weekend in your Facebook feed.

You might see, amid the family photos, a menacing video of Donald Trump talking about how “my views are a little bit different than if I lived in Iowa”. LIKE ON ABORTION, blares the sponsored ad from Cruz’s deep-pocketed, social media-savvy digital team. And you might wonder how this campaign managed, by paying Facebook, to differentiate between Trump’s “New York values” and “OURS”.

Facebook, which told investors on Wednesday it was “excited about the targeting”, does not let candidates track individual users. But it does now allow presidential campaigns to upload their massive email lists and voter files – which contain political habits, real names, home addresses and phone numbers – to the company’s advertising network. The company will then match real-life voters with their Facebook accounts, which follow individuals as they move across congressional districts and are filled with insightful data.

The data is encrypted and not maintained by Facebook after ads run, the company said. Acxiom, a massive data broker based in Little Rock, Arkansas, helps campaigns upload the voter info. But a campaign operative said the Texas senator has been using Facebook ads to raise money, among other things, and a Guardian analysis shows Cruz-affiliated donors are spending $10,000 per day on Facebook “placement” as the first vote nears.

In Iowa, the Cruz campaign is using Facebook to target voters on a range of broad issues like immigration controls to niche specific causes such as abolishing state laws against the sale of fireworks. The Guardian understands the campaign has built a specific model for this relatively small group of voters, who may be responsive to Cruz ads against big government, and in some cases is going out to find them individually.

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Political scientists, current campaign advisors and former digital gurus to Barack Obama and Mitt Romney agree: a Facebook ad is perhaps the best money to spend in what could be a nearly $10bn election, and 2016 is fast becoming the year Facebook learned to profit from how you vote.

The acceleration of real-time voter targeting reflects a growing consensus that, in addition to knocking down Trump this weekend, campaigns of the future will depend as much on being able to track people across screens and apps as knocking on doors or sending out flyers.



Facebook profiles turned into campaign currency also offer another sign of Silicon Valley’s growing influence in America’s political system. The company in recent years has increased its lobbying efforts in Washington to press immigration, surveillance and patent policy, while doubling its political staff and adding other features to make it easier for campaigns to reach specific voting groups in what Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg this week dubbed “the new town hall”.

“Facebook is the easiest and most effective platform,” said Zac Moffatt, the top digital strategist for Romney’s 2012 campaign whose firm, Targeted Victory, has worked with most of the Republican presidential candidates and the Republican National Committee during this election cycle. “They are so much more valuable than they were eight years ago.”

Shaping perceptions, making millions

Campaigns have been using Facebook to talk to voters since 2008, when Obama’s first bid for president famously used the platform to get supporters to push their digital friends to support the upstart senator. In 2012, Facebook began co-sponsoring presidential debates in the Republican primaries.

This time around, as Republicans spend big to catch up on Democrats’ advantage on tech-driven campaigns, Facebook has launched another new feature to help campaigns target politically active users, who might post constantly about Trump’s latest insult or share the increasing poll leads of Bernie Sanders.

Facebook will find users who like lots of political content and share it with their friends, mark them as “political influencers” and allow campaigns to target them specifically. As one of Facebook’s monetization executives explained to Wired after the quiet launch of influencer tracking in November: “People are more likely to trust information that their friends share.”

Cruz’s campaign began using this product immediately after launch. Chris Wilson, the Texas senator’s director of research and analytics, said the campaign had found success in targeting voters in this way. “It can help the message to spread far more quickly than other types of advertising,” he told the Guardian.

We’re seeing politicians at all levels really take advantage of that targeting. Sheryl Sandberg

Facebook is “playing a key role in shaping the public perception of a candidate definitely more so than in the past”, said Marie Danzig, former deputy digital director for the 2012 Obama campaign and now head of creative and delivery at Blue State Digital, a Democratic campaign group that also works with nonprofits and companies.

Part of the shift, Danzig said, comes from Facebook – long the place where cranky relatives debate politics and politicians ask for “likes” – growing older as “more and more of our grandparents popped up on there”. The presidential race was the most discussed topic on the site in 2015 – the year before voting starts, with the Iowa caucuses on Monday and a slew of primary states thereafter.

In the meantime, Americans in general are spending more time on smartphones and since the last election Facebook has begun serving mobile video ads. In an earnings call last year, Facebook executives said that one of every five minutes Americans spend on smartphones is spent on Facebook.

It remains unclear how much Facebook stands to profit from its role in the election, but political spending on digital ads is expected to exceed $1bn in 2016, up from $159m in 2012, according to research by media analysts at Borrell Associates. Half of online political ad spending in 2016 is expected to go toward social media.

Analysts at Citigroup this fall estimated campaigns will spend about $607m on digital ads during the 2016 cycle, an increase from $145m in the 2012 election. The analysts expect Facebook to edge out Alphabet’s YouTube as the leading recipient of that spending.

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Those campaign spending estimates represent a sliver of the $5.6bn in ad sales Facebook reported on Wednesday that it had earned during the last three months of 2015. (The company said 80% – about $4.6bn – came from mobile advertising alone). Facebook does not break out ad spending on politics, and the price per ad is based on a constant auction.

Sandberg, the Facebook chief operating officer, told investors during a call on Wednesday that “the 2016 election is a big deal in terms of ad spend”, comparing direct political advertising from campaigns and outside groups to the World Cup, the Super Bowl and the Olympics. That ability to target, Sandberg said, was key: “Using Facebook and Instagram ads you can target by congressional district, you can target by interest, you can target by demographics or any combination of those”, she told analysts. “And we’re seeing politicians at all levels really take advantage of that targeting.”

Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook founder and chief executive, said the company was trying to “introduce organic ways the people can interact with businesses” as well as “the politicians – not necessarily ads but organic interactions”.

Sandberg was more specific in connecting organic sharing with targeted advertising: “We think that kind of direct engagement, where people can hold their elected officials accountable and elected officials can speak directly to constituents, is a really important part of our mission.”

‘A tool that travels with you’

Facebook Twitter Pinterest When Donald Trump pulled out of Thursday’s Republican debate, Ted Cruz’s meme-makers went straight to work. Photograph: Ted Cruz/Facebook

Volunteers and operatives from more than a dozen campaigns are busy knocking on doors and blitzing old-fashioned mailboxes this weekend. But perhaps the more effective direct marketing is being done far away from backyards in Iowa.

When Trump dropped out of Thursday’s Republican debate in a boycott of Fox News, Cruz’s digital team turned around an instant meme – Ducking Donald – that went viral, but more importantly provided them with fresh email addresses, which in turn could become more donations and targeted Facebook ads.

The Texas senator told the Guardian in an interview last year that his digital funding and outreach apparatus “is very much the Obama model”, but many Republican campaigns have accepted so-called micro-targeting as the new norm in spending unregulated donations effectively.

While “Facebook ads definitely don’t replace direct mail”, the company’s increasing capabilities to match Facebook profiles against voter databases “allow better targeting and faster turnaround time”, said Marianne Copenhaver, creative director for Kentucky senator Rand Paul’s presidential campaign.

“Facebook has been a game-changer for our campaign and for the entire electoral process,” she said. “We now have the ability to go live directly to the voters and reach thousands of people instantly.”

Features that target political “influencers” across social media are especially helpful as voters move from one address to another. “Facebook is a tool that travels with you,” said Eitan Hersh, assistant professor in political science at Yale University.

There’s an important difference between what people share voluntarily ... and what they have no desire to share. Chris Wilson, Ted Cruz's director of research and analytics

Cruz’s campaign has paid at least $750,000 to a consulting firm with expertise in harvesting psychological data from tens of thousands of Facebook profiles, as the Guardian revealed in December.



Wilson, from the Cruz campaign, said: “[Facebook] is effective because it allows us to reach voters and it’s useful because it allows us to take our message directly to them.” He suggested Facebook ads are less intrusive because, unlike traditional TV ads, people can scroll past them.

He dismissed any suggestion of a discrepancy between Cruz’s past opposition to government bulk surveillance and his use of targeted techniques online. In a telephone interview, Wilson said: “There’s an important difference between what people share voluntarily on social media and what they have no desire to share, like their cellphone metadata.”

On its campaign website, Facebook cites a 2013 study that found $1 can buy 200 ads on its newsfeed compared to two direct mail pieces.



Analysis of federal campaign disclosures shows the Keep the Promise group of Super Pacs, which support Cruz, have poured almost $100,000 into Facebook ads this month. In recent days, its spending with Facebook has intensified to around $10,000 per day for “digital media production/placement”.

Overall, this kind of spending would allow the donor coalition to place an estimated 20m ads across the social network.

The next round of mandatory disclosures is expected to reveal a windfall of digital consulting fees on Sunday, allowing a fuller transparency of how Super Pac funding powers social media targeting to arrive just one day before the Iowa caucuses.

For all the talk of technical wizardry, it remains risky for campaigns to become overly reliant on digital acumen, said Harper Reed, the chief technology officer of Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign. “It’s just more complicated,” Reed said in a recent interview. “It’s so much more about technology than people. Politics are weird-ass nuanced things.”