Why Have the Conservatives Suspended Their Digital Campaign?

Who Targets Me reports that the Conservative party's digital ad campaign has been switched off. Josiah Mortimer has been speaking to advertising experts about the reasons

Who Targets Me has just written up an excellent analysis on the switch off of the Conservative Party’s digital ad campaign The Tory Digital Strategy: Going, going, gone?

They say:

At the time of writing, and following Sunak’s self-inflicted D-Day gaffe, every single digital ad on their main pages has been switched off. Currently, the campaign has no active ads on Facebook, Instagram, Google or YouTube.

All quiet on the Tory front (data from Meta and Google)

Most notably, the ad making the claim at the centre of Sunak’s debate ‘victory’ (that Labour would hike taxes by £2,000 over the next parliament) and which many expected would be repeated ad infinitum right up to polling day, stopped too. The Conservatives had spent nearly £40k on it, and by the time of the debate it had already been running for several days and been shown up to 10 million times. It’s now gone like all the rest.

Until this point, the Conservatives had focused their advertising spend on the profile of typical Reform UK voters: mostly men, mostly over 45 years old, with interests in issues like the monarchy, the military, and immigration.  This approach was aligned with their stated strategy - an attempt to limit the electoral damage on their right flank.

Demographic profile of those seeing a typical Tory ad.

But following the return of Nigel Farage, both the wider Conservative political strategy - and from our particular perspective the party’s digital marketing strategy - seem to have been blown to bits. Since becoming PM, Rishi Sunak has tried several different angles in an attempt to find something that works. He’s had a go at ‘change’, ‘continuity’, ‘toughness’ and being the man with a plan in an uncertain world. None has shifted the dial. Now the rightward pivot to reclaim Reform voters for the Tories is gone too.

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Byline Times spoke to several leading figures in the ad industry on this story. The consensus was that everything has gone so wrong that the Conservative have pulled all their ads while they work out a new strategy - as they are likely afraid that anything they do now will only make it worse. 

This is pretty unprecedented in the middle of an election campaign and shows the depth of despair, our executive editor Stephen Colgrave, a former Saatchi and Saatchi senior executive, said. "They are like headless chickens and don’t know what to do next," he added. 

Another senior media executive claimed the Conservatives are "desperately trying to regroup after a catalogue of errors." And a digital advertising executive told this outlet: "They are building a case study of exactly how not to promote an election that will be studied by University marketing departments for decades."