Joe Biden’s campaign abandons multimillion-dollar Facebook digital ad push

Joe Biden’s spend on Facebook advertising dropped an astonishing 65 percent last month after a costly push for elusive young voters saw the Democratic nominee pumping up to $1.4 million a day into the platform.

With less than 100 days until the election, the campaign slashed its entire digital spend by more than half between June and July, according to ad records from Facebook and Google.

Digital operatives speculated the campaign’s decision to cut its online drive, which came at the height of the Black Lives Matter protests in early June, was because the ads were unsuccessful and failed to raise money for the septuagenarian candidate.

The Democratic nominee’s campaign quintupled spending in the first days of June from $254,000 on June 1 to $1.4 million on June 4, according to Facebook’s ad library.

Biden dropped $5.5 million in the first week of June on ads skewering the president for his response to protests in Minneapolis after the death of George Floyd — accusing him fanning “the flames of white supremacy” and asking voters to donate and endorse Biden.

It was more than what the campaign had spent in the first 10 months of Biden’s White House bid.

Trump’s campaign by comparison spent about $1.27 million on Facebook ads in the same week.

A CNN report announcing the huge spend said the campaign was making an appeal to young voters with a digital ad about systemic racism running on Facebook, YouTube, Snapchat and Google in swing states.

But just weeks later, Biden’s campaign dramatically pulled back... (Read more)

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