MoveOn, a George Soros-funded anti-Republican PAC, was allegedly the biggest political Facebook advertisement spender last week — the final week before the midterm elections.
MoveOn’s Washington Director, Ben Wikler, bragged about the PAC’s advertisement budget, along with its “secret weapon” against the Republican Party, which consisted of using hundreds of videos of voters explaining why they’re voting Democrat.
NEW: Nationwide, @MoveOn was the biggest spender on political ads on Facebook last week. Today, we’re pulling back the curtains on this election’s “secret weapon”: a groundbreaking new way to do digital ads that leapfrogs the GOP’s political tech. THREAD. https://t.co/lhpoLDhANm
— Ben Wikler (@benwikler) November 5, 2018
“Nationwide, @MoveOn was the biggest spender on political ads on Facebook last week,” declared Wikler on Twitter, Monday. “Today, we’re pulling back the curtains on this election’s ‘secret weapon’: a groundbreaking new way to do digital ads that leapfrogs the GOP’s political tech.”
“Traditional political advertising works like this: campaigns run polls to see what voters care about. They choose a message. They spend ~$10k-30k to shoot & edit. If they’re smart, they test them, often via dial-test or focus groups. Then they pay to put them online & on TV,” continued Wikler. “This year, MoveOn turned that model on its head. We started by asking real voters in key races why they’re supporting their Democratic candidates. We collected more than 2500 authentic, unscripted videos—people talking into their phones.”
“We used a new, rapid, low-cost, and highly accurate technique to test whether the ads moved people. Classic scientific experiment, with randomized treatment and control groups. We found 260 videos that worked as extraordinarily persuasive political ads,” he proclaimed, adding, “We used Facebook’s targeting technology to run the 260 ads to people matching the specific folks who found them persuasive in our tests, across 89 House races, 10 Senate races, and 10 governors’ races. In all, we’re reaching more than 20 million potential voters in key areas.”
Wikler then declared that the advertisements “don’t look slick. They look real. Because they are.”
“That might help explain their impact. Or maybe it’s the topics people talked about—not stuff brainstormed on a consultant’s whiteboard, just actual people speaking from the heart… Regardless of exactly why, the most striking thing about this program: it actually *works* to move votes,” Wikler concluded. “Which is, unfortunately, a very rare thing in politics.”
On its official website, MoveOn, which is financially backed by socialist billionaire George Soros, explains its goal is to “end Republican control of Congress,” and promote a “progressive future,” and the PAC frequently uses the hashtag #ResistAndWin.
