Mike Bloomberg’s unorthodox presidential campaign has many asking if a billionaire can buy the presidency. He can certainly buy Americans’ Facebook feeds, a Guardian analysis shows.

In the first six weeks of 2020, more than 1.6bn of the 2.4bn presidential campaign ads shown to US Facebook users were from the Bloomberg campaign. Since launching his campaign in mid-November, the former mayor of New York City has spent nearly $45m on Facebook ads – more than all his opponents combined.

And Bloomberg’s spending doesn’t just dwarf that of other Democrats; Donald Trump’s giant re-election effort on Facebook looks paltry in comparison.

The Trump campaign’s Facebook operation has been notable for running a huge volume of advertisements, launching tens of thousands of ads seen by just a handful of people and testing hundreds of minor variations of different messages. In recent weeks, the Bloomberg campaign has begun running three times as many ads as Trump.

To understand how and why Bloomberg is spending so much money on Facebook, the Guardian built a database of the 142,937 Facebook ads launched by the Bloomberg campaign between 15 November 2019, when he first started running campaign ads, and 18 February. The data comes from Facebook’s political ad archive application programming interface, or API. What emerges is a portrait of a campaign operating at an unprecedented scale that at times stoops to Trumpian tactics – and has such large reserves of cash it can afford to spend extravagantly.

The result is both scattershot and overwhelming, suggesting that when a campaign never has to make any difficult choices, the choices it does make can defy common sense. Among the more perplexing moves: Bloomberg has spent more money showing ads about wildfires to voters in Ohio than voters in California.

Facebook ads are just one aspect of Bloomberg’s unusual campaign. (He’s sitting out the first four primary states, for example.) The billionaire has spent more than $250m on television ads and more than $40m on Google and YouTube ads. His campaign is also pioneering new modes of digital campaigning that are not captured by the transparency tools put in place by Facebook and Google following the 2016 election.

He enlisted the digital marketing firm behind the ill-fated Fyre Festival to run a campaign paying Instagram influencers to post Bloomberg memes to their social media followers, the New York Times reported. He is also paying part-time “deputy digital organizers” to lobby their personal contacts via text message on his behalf, according to the Wall Street Journal. On Thursday, his campaign shared a video on Instagram and Twitter that used edited footage to create a false narrative of what happened in Wednesday’s debate.

Taken together, Bloomberg’s official Facebook ads – both the messages they convey and the way in which they are targeted – provide valuable insight into the campaign of a candidate who has barely been tested in unscripted settings, appearing in just one debate so far and dodging difficult interviews with the press.

The Bloomberg campaign did not respond to a request to comment on the record.

Money, money, money, money

At first glance, Bloomberg’s Facebook strategy tracks with his overall approach to the campaign: skip the first four primary states while pouring vast amounts of money into Super Tuesday.

The campaign’s extraordinary spending largely aligns with a strategy of targeting delegate-rich states whose primaries fall on Super Tuesday or later. He has spent the most overall on California, Texas and Florida – three of the four states with the largest number of delegates – followed by Illinois and North Carolina. On a per-delegate basis, the campaign is spending the most in Texas, North Carolina, Arkansas, Virginia and Tennessee.

(Facebook provides data for ad spending and impressions – the number of times a user was shown an ad – as a range. For this article, we used the lower number, meaning that our data on dollars spent or impressions received represents the minimum amount.)

Much of Bloomberg’s messaging focuses on Donald Trump and the impact of his presidency. Next are some of the issues of most concern to Democratic voters. Healthcare represents a significant portion of the campaign, as does Bloomberg’s signature issue: guns.

Other major topics include the environment and the climate crisis, immigration, education and infrastructure. There are ads with messages targeted specifically to women, African Americans and Latinos, though the campaign spent less on the African American and Latino ads than on ads about wildfires. (This analysis only refers to those ads that are explicitly referencing African Americans or Latinos, and does not mean that Bloomberg was not attempting to reach those voters with other messages.)

The campaign’s spending on ads with messaging about women or reproductive health is substantial. Overall, the campaign’s ads have been shown to significantly more women than men.

But other aspects of the Facebook campaign raise questions about Bloomberg’s strategy, and whether it goes beyond throwing money at voters’ Facebook Timelines to see what sticks.

Where’s the smoke?

In mid-January, as news of the Australian brushfires filled social media feeds with devastating images of the climate crisis, the Bloomberg presidential campaign debuted a new Facebook ad targeting California voters.

“Wildfire prevention needs to be part of our climate plan,” read the caption above a photograph of a wooded mountain in flames. “Mike will get it done.”

Targeting California voters with a message about wildfires is the kind of savvy political move that one might expect from a campaign that is competently run – and sparing no expense. Democratic voters overwhelmingly support government action on climate change, and wildfires are of particular concern to Americans on the west coast, according to recent polling by the Pew Research Center.

And yet, in subsequent weeks, the Bloomberg campaign began targeting wildfire ads at voters in states where wildfires are not a threat – and where polling shows other climate-related issues are of much greater interest to voters. The Bloomberg campaign has thus far spent more money on wildfire ads targeting voters in Texas (more than $60,000), Ohio and Illinois (more than $45,000 each) than California (more than $44,000). Of the $567,700 his campaign has spent in total on wildfire ads, just 15% has gone to voters in Pacific and mountain states where wildfires tend to occur.

The wildfire ads are emblematic of the at-times distorted logic of Bloomberg’s campaign spending. To an average campaign, half a million dollars is a significant amount of money that would require, for example, 27,000 donations from Bernie Sanders supporters (whose donations average $18.53) or multiple trips to a wine cave. Amy Klobuchar’s campaign has spent just $544,000 on all Facebook advertising since Bloomberg entered the race in November.

But to Bloomberg, the amount is insignificant. The half-million-dollar expenditure to a man with a fortune estimated at $65.2bn is comparable to the average American (median household net worth of $97,300) spending 85 cents.

Some of the campaign’s state targeting is also puzzling. It has spent at least $125,000 targeting voters in Vermont, Sanders’ home state. This isn’t a case of Vermont voters seeing ads intended for a national audience; most of the spending comes from ads that received 95% or more of their impressions in Vermont, suggesting intentional targeting. On a per-capita basis, the Bloomberg campaign has spent more money reaching Vermont voters than voters in any other state.

Unlike his opponents, Bloomberg is not using Facebook ads to fundraise, so he is not running the kind of urgent appeals and contests that Trump and other candidates employ. Some of his ads do still resemble Trump-style clickbait, however, such as a number of advertisements that feature heart-tugging images of imperiled animals.

“Mike saves animals”, reads the message on one set of ads that closely mirror Facebook ads run by the Trump campaign. “You be the one to tell this sea turtle that her species has no future,” reads the caption on a video ad starring a heart-wrenching baby sea turtle.

‘Crazy Donald’

And then there’s the invective. Trump is by far the most common topic of Bloomberg’s ads, and a frequent message is that the president is unfit for the presidency. But the ads often mimic some of the very behaviors that define Trump’s communication style, calling him “dangerous”, “unhinged”, “unfit”, “embarrassing”, “a sell out”, “a con man”, a “madman”, “a bully” and “crazy”.

In some ads, the campaign adopts Trump’s habit of giving opponents demeaning nicknames, referring to him as “crazy Donald”.

Many ads refer to Trump’s use of Twitter. “Do President Trump’s tweets make you just want to get away?” one reads. “Mike Bloomberg will put an end to the dysfunction and bring calm, steady leadership.”

Perhaps the campaign is relying on the fact that most Facebook users do not use Twitter. If they did, they might have noticed that over the last several days, Bloomberg has himself been engaged in a decidedly puerile Twitter fight, with Trump.

Michael Barton and Joseph Smith contributed reporting