3 things that are more interesting than that Taylor Swift video

Let me convince you that at least 3 things are more interesting than the Taylor Swift endorsement deep/cheap/creepfake (which of course is just copying what Trump did, also for attention). These 3 things relate to political finance:

One party is spending 80% more in the run up to the GE than it was at the same time in the Local / European Election cycle
We now have a (partial) answer questions about the role digital ad spending plays in Ireland in overall election strategy
A new data dump reveals that one candidate spent almost €95k in the European elections, to get just over 3,201 votes.

1: We are off to a mixed start compared to June

With a Nov 29th date the current consensus, we are effectively just under 5 weeks out from the General Election. Having a timeframe allows us to do a comparison; how does what parties are spending on online ads now compare to what they were spending for June's Local & European elections?

I pulled Meta spending data across all party accounts for the 3 week period 6-8 weeks out from each election, and a definite pattern emerges.

Sinn Fein is spending 80% more than it did in the lead up to the Local & Europeans, an indication that they may break their record spending of over €200k last time out.

The other outlier in the data is Fianna Fáil, who are down close to 50%.

So what is going on?

It could be that with Sinn Fein woes dominating, they feel pressure to reframe the story. And the other parties might see no need to push any particular narrative at the moment; let the media do that job for you.

Or maybe the government party is holding fire, to save face for the little election day dance they are making us all play.

2: Fine Gael's revealing election spending return

SIPO, the political finance regulator, has started to publish the reports that candidates and parties have to submit after the European elections.

This is a treasure throve of extremely unusable data, that I will be coming back to in the weeks ahead as I try out every data cleaning tool I can get my hands on.

Fine Gael's returns were pretty easy to extract (thank you compliance team!) and give us an idea of where digital advertising fits in with overall party strategy.

There are two headlines from this:

Digital campaigning took up almost a quarter of Fine Gael HQ's overall election expenditure

Fine Gael HQ spent €770k on the European elections over all, and they spent more on the digital campaign (€178k, or 23%) than on election posters (€173k), leaflets and election materials (€127k) or campaign workers (€91k).

The party declared €96k in spending on digital advertising, plus an additional €81k on various digital supports - this includes categories like content creation, videography, "digital props", "digital supports" and digital reports.

These two categories take up a sizeable portion of the overall advertising budget, which was €303k, which is broken down below.

You can see in the next graphic that this spend was not equally distributed.

The Dublin Candidate, Regina Doherty relied much more heavily on outdoor advertising than a digital campaign.

Digital ads were more important for Maria Walsh in her sprawling Midlands-North-west constituency. (Again, note that this is just HQ expenditure, candidates spent some of their own funds, which are not included here.)

3: How to lose an election (and a small fortune)

One candidate for the recent European Elections has declared spending some €94,933 on his campaign, despite receiving just 3,201 votes, or 0.47%.

James Reynolds was interviewed at the count centre by ShannonSide radio, and you can listen to him here put his loss down to the fact that he was running for the National Party, a party he co-founded, which he considers "toxic".

Just over €68k of Mr. Reynold's expenses were on advertising, according to his return, including €12,300 paid to "Agrirecruit for Agriland Digital Advertisers", and about €14k to the Irish Farmers Journal, who also run digital ads.