Eric Wilson, Marco Rubio’s digital director during his Presidential run, in 2016, told me, “The best online marketers are agnostic, as opposed to prescriptive. Anyone with a lot of money can buy a lot of ads, but what really matters is measurement, because without that you have no idea which ads are having any effect.” This sort of measurement is the province of “ad-tech” firms. Clients decide which metrics they want maximized—often some quantitative measure of success on Google and Facebook, which together control about half of the online ad market—and the ad-tech firms optimize for that outcome. In the summer of 2016, Parscale hired two leading ad-tech firms—Sprinklr, based in New York, and Kenshoo, based in Tel Aviv—to send subcontractors to work for him in San Antonio. Sprinklr also assigned remote employees, stationed in various time zones, to crunch numbers at all hours. In addition to data provided by the R.N.C. and traditional voter files, the Trump campaign had access to a repository of information provided by the Data Trust, a private company that Karl Rove and other conservative bigwigs had established in 2011. There are restrictions that prevent certain kinds of data sharing among nonprofit political entities, but those don’t apply to for-profit companies.
The Obama campaigns used Facebook and other digital tools extensively, as well.
2018: Facebook and elections event.