In this week’s episode of The Political Marketing Podcast, I sit down with a true trailblazer in the field of political advertising, Sam Jeffers.
Sam is the founder of Who Targets Me, a transparency project that tracks and analyses online political advertising. He’s also a thought leader with a unique insight into both the tech platforms and the legislative powers that, occasionally, try to hold them to account.
The main topic for our conversation was the deeply regrettable recent announcement that Meta is suspending political advertising in the European Union, following a similar move by Google earlier this year.
This decision, born from the platforms’ reaction to a new wave of EU regulations, has seismic implications for the future of democratic campaigning. But before we got on to that, we went back to the beginning.
The Origin Story of Who Targets Me
Sam’s journey started at Blue State Digital, the legendary agency that worked on the Obama 2008 and 2012 Presidential campaigns. In the 2015 UK general election, he and his team worked on the Labour Party’s digital strategy. While they had a social media strategy it didn’t include any paid media recommendations.
After the campaign concluded Sam was surprised to learn that the Conservative Party spent a lot of money on Facebook. That investment, used to intelligently target Lib Dem-held constituencies, contributed to the Tories’ unexpected majority.
This experience, combined with the Brexit and Trump ‘16 digital campaigns which also used paid social media in novel ways, encouraged him to find a way to take a closer look at what was really going on.
In the run-up to the 2017 snap election, Sam launched Who Targets Me as a “spontaneous effort” to reverse-engineer social media advertising. His team built a simple browser extension, and within weeks, over 15,000 people donated their ad data. The goal was to paint a real-time picture of modern campaigning and push for greater transparency.
From Browser Extension to Global Watchdog
Since those early days, Who Targets Me has evolved into a sophisticated international effort. While the platforms have introduced their own ad transparency measures, their data often falls short. Sam’s team has filled that gap by building a massive database of over 125,000 advertisers in 50-60 countries.
Their tools, charts, leaderboards, and analysis help journalists and researchers truly understand digital campaigns. As I’ve always believed, and Sam agrees, if you want to know what political parties are really trying to achieve, you need to look at their advertising.
Why Digital Political Advertising Is Actually a Good Thing
Both Sam and I share a surprisingly rare view: well-regulated, transparent political advertising is, on balance, a good thing for democracy. Sam argues that, for example, it’s “a cheap and effective way” for local politicians to communicate with their constituents about issues like pothole repairs and bin collections. It gives a voice to campaigns that would otherwise struggle to get reach. It’s certainly a far healthier system than the pre-2010 era, when parties had to beg or bully news organisations just to get their message out.
The EU Regulations and the Platforms’ Exit
So why have Meta and Google pulled the plug on political advertising? The EU’s new legislation on political advertising was designed to standardise transparency and verification. It also introduced a thorny component banning targeting political ads based on “sensitive data,” which can be difficult to define.
Sam believes this is where the platforms hit a wall. For Google, the new rules required them to “massively expand” their transparency and verification programs, which they likely considered too much work. For Meta, with its broader definition of what a political ad is, the restrictions on targeting would have a significant impact on many advertisers who spend a lot of money with them. Ultimately, it seems both companies looked at the regulation and decided it wasn’t worth the bother, especially given the low revenue from political advertising and the risk of absolutely massive fines for violations.
Sam pointed out that there is also a significant amount of White House stakeholder management behind the decision from Google and Meta. With Trump and JD Vance making EU regulation of US companies and free speech two key issues, the big tech platforms had few incentives to calmly comply with the EU legislation.
The Damaging Fallout
Sam warns that the platforms’ withdrawal is a damaging development. The inability to buy reach for ads “immediately remove[s] the ability of your kind of average, boring, mainstream… political party to get much reach on the internet”.
These parties have historically relied on paid reach to find voters, and now that is gone. The new landscape gives an advantage to those who can master viral, organic content. It’s a fundamental shift that could reshape European politics for years to come.
To get the full story, listen to the complete episode of The Political Marketing Podcast with Sam Jeffers wherever you get your podcasts.
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