President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

I think that you don't realize what you're doing.

 

#peakstain

 

I know the difference between Trump on one side and regular Republicans on the other, but I haven't seen much of that from "the left" which makes your screaming that the world is ending less credible, even though it may well be.

 

90% of the Republican party is fully on board with Trumpism. He's not some divergence from the cause, he's simply the culmination of it.

 

I can go *so* much further.

 

Lucky for me you were logged in. Dodged a bullet there.

 

Happy to help.

 

More effective and less costly. The more data I can plug into the system when we're targeting, the better it is.

For example, we were working on getting a major retailer to carry a new widget we're producing. The buyer wasn't convinced yet. So using easily accessed public info, I designed a FB and IG campaign that was centered directly on him. Yeah, if there were other men in his age range and zip code who met criteria A, B, C, D, E they saw the ads too. But two weeks later, he called our VP of sales and said "I've been seeing a lot about this new product on social media. We'll take it." I spent a grand total of $250 and we saw a substantial ROI on that.

 

Facebook is the most effective advertising tool ever invented specifically because it allows a skilled advertiser to pay the smallest amount possible to reach the exact type of person who buys his or her product.

Your FB newsfeed features about 1 paid post for every 4 or 5 posts from a friend or organization you follow. That means the competition is very fierce to get in front of you if you are a demographic someone wants to reach (sorry, but you and I are of an age where no one wants to reach us...but that's another thread).

So let's say I want to convince people to vote for Candidate A, who is a member of the Orange Party. If I can get a hold of the local voter records, then I know who is a registered member of the Orange Party. Depending on the jurisdiction, it may indeed tell me the person's actual email address (but even if it doesn't, chances are I can find that info out from the party itself). Once I have that email address, I then load it into FB and viola, I have access to you. But that's not all, I also have access to your friends. And I have access to everything you've ever liked or commented on. And I also know what websites you visit (because the websites have a FB tracking pixel on them).

OK, so election day is getting close. Sure, I can pay $5 to get an ad or a news story that promotes Candidate A or the Orange Party into your feed, or better still, I can get a fake news story that slags Candidate B and her Pink Party. But when I do that, I'm competing against the other parties who are also paying $5 to reach you -- or maybe they are willing to pay $6, which means they'll get their message into your feed first, and mine will go second, which means you may not see it because you only scroll through your first 9 posts before you get bored and go turn on Fox News. So in that case, I don't get charged the $5 because you never actually saw my ad, but I don't get my message across, either.

But if I'm good at what I do, there's a way around that. Instead of telling FB I want to pay $5 to reach fans of the Orange Party, I can use an app like ConnectIO to glean the information I need to then tell FB I want to pay $2 to reach men aged 34-45 in XX-zip codes who have liked the Orange Party, have visited FoxNews.com, have liked the NRA, have a Bass Pro credit card, have a Ford 150, and take Viagra. FB will tell me exactly the size of that audience, and I will cater my ad to them. And FB knows all this because FB (like Google) has data centers churning out this very information about all of us 24/7.

And so that's how I can get in someone's newsfeed for less than my competition, and be more likely to get the result I want.

But wait, there's more...

I don't need your email to do all this. I can actually just go to OrangeParty.com's FB pixel and pull from it all the details I want about the type of people who have visited the site. In this case, I learn that those people like Fox News, NRA, shop at Bass Pro, drive a F150, and take Viagara...so then I can tell FB to take this Custom Audience and create a look alike audience of 2 percent -- that's people who have never visited OrangeParty.com but have done everything else. I can then load them up into an ad campaign and target them as well. But as you can tell, this last part requires the help of the people who have the data, i.e. the Orange Party itself.

And I can run these ads not just on FB...thanks to Facebook Audience Network, I can also target them on places like SJ.com or Breitbart.

Hope this long-winded explanation explains something; I feel like Ragu.

EDIT:

Popping back in to add this PS:
If I can create a skillful message that you agree with (say, a funny meme that attacks my challenger) then I can get you to share it to your friends, and FB will send it to 10 or so of them...and it won't cost me a penny! And they'll tell 10 friends, and so on, and so on...

 

For those like QYFW who didn't actually ready the article, that's not what Trudeau said.

 

OK, what's the solution? As long as billionaires are running FB and the like, it's not like they will accept heavy regulations -- as if that were the answer anyway. Seems like skilled manipulation is part of our future, whether we like it or not.