Exploratory Qualitative Analysis
The Joe Biden's campaign messaging strategy is to rally the audience member against Donald Trump while avoiding the use of the word Republican. This may be because Joe Biden decided on a politically center moderate approach. Focusing the message's attacks on Trump instead of Republicans, it allows Joe the opportunity to reach out to Republican voters that disapprove of Trump's performance as a president.
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The message tone is more grim as one of them even states, "This makes us nervous. The Trump campaign just announced...". Compared to Obama's campaign that heavily emphasized the emotion of "Hope", this strategy may actually provide access to a greater audience. The negative tone is reminiscent of Trump and other Republican message types that also emphasize fear against Democrats. However, Biden's target of fear is much more concrete and target's Trump directly rather than an abstract concept like caravans of thugs (the other) or socialist agenda. This type of messaging that was effective for Trump's 2016 campaign may help Biden garner support for Republican voters do not want to see a second term of Trump.
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Another interesting feature of Biden's messages is the use of numbers to describe the fundraising or performance disparities between candidates. For example, "We need 71 more responses from your area...", "Bernie Sanders is leading us by ONE point", and "Arizona: Trump 49, Biden 45".
Content Analysis by Year
Throughout Biden's campaign messages from 2018 to 2020, the focus has been to either remove Trump from the White House or portraying Joe Biden as the best Democratic option to win the 2020 Presidential Election.
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2018:
Messages during this year only appeared during the tail end of 2018. The tone of these messages are similar to the Obama campaign of emphasizing "Hope".
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2019:
During 2019, Joe Biden's campaign against Trump came into full swing. Much of these messages are about asking for donations and moving to defeat Donald Trump. The most common messages are those that ask the audience to partake in surveys that ask for what issues they think are important.
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2020:
Messages from this year have the most aggressive language describing Trump's corruption, shortcomings, and mistakes as a president. Some messages are hopeful by presenting liberal ideals like vowing to increase diversity in his administration.
Most Distributed FB Ad Messages
Exploratory Quantitative Analysis
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The Biden campaign's activity are at the highest in mid-2019 and between Feb 2020 and Aug 2020. The possible reason for the 2019 spike is the Democratic Presidential Primaries which had fierce contest between numerous Democratic candidates.
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The average targetedness utilized by the Biden campaign began high and stabilized until after the 2019 democratic primaries. 2020 showed very little targeting behaviors by the Biden campaign on Facebook.
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This graph helps show how many instances of high or low targetedness messages were implemented from 2018 to 2020. Initially, there was some experimentation in 2018 on high targetedness, but stabilized at medium targetedness for the Democratic Primaries from May 2019 to Sept 2019. The overwhelming amount of messages being sent from the Biden campaign were non-discriminatory for the 2020 Presidential Election.
Audience interests that are targeted for messaging orbit around those the like The Rachel Maddow Show, Democratic Party, and Barack Obama. The types of interests are politicians, media figures, media institutions, and non-profit institutions.
This chart describes the level of assistance the Biden Campaign received from each Public Relations entity. Anne Lewis Strategies is a digital marketing firm that aided Biden's 2020 campaign outreach and targeting efforts.
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A substantial number of messages were targeted toward FB users in country/rural areas.
Funding sources for Biden's FB campaign efforts come primarily from the "Biden for President" and "Biden Victory Fund".
Age groups targeted were mostly 18 and above, but from early mid 2019 to mid 2020, some messages were targeted at 30 and older audiences. Possibly because younger generations are very liberal and the Biden campaign wanted to reach out to more moderate voters or Republican voters that want to defect.