Inside the digital ads blueprint of BJP and Congress

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₹50 crore by both the parties. The platforms enable targeting on several counts. Meta, for example, lets an advertiser specify, to whom (age and gender), where (state), and how much, how many times (‘impressions’), and to what spending limit, it wants an ad to be shown.

Each permutation and combination of such attributes generates a unique ad ID, and this is where the BJP is more active. As per our analysis, at the upper band of both payment and usage, the Congress would have spent 25% and 34% less than the BJP in directly placing ads on Google and Meta, respectively. But the BJP had 32-35 times more unique ad IDs as compared to the Congress.

As a result, its average spend per ad ID would be about 5% that of the Congress. In other words, the BJP is doing a lot more micro-targeting than the Congress. In today's digital age, where user data is readily captured and made available for advertisers, digital platforms can enable formidable targeting.

For example, a BJP ad released on Meta in Hindi in Dadra and Nagar Haveli on 23 April was directed at 14 types of demographic combinations, all classified on age and gender alone. It defined that 33% of the people who see the ad should be male users aged between 18 and 24 years, and 14% should be female users aged between 18 and 24 years. There were 12 other such age-gender combinations, with their shares ranging between 0.0794% and 8%, collectively adding up to 100%.

The Congress is also doing the same thing with its ads, but it is slicing and dicing its audience in far fewer ways than the BJP. Take Kerala, for instance, which voted on 26 April. During the period of analysis, the BJP ran 1,700 ad IDs on Meta that specified Kerala as a region where these ads should be shown in some