Tracking the Political Ad War in Real TimE for Who Targets Me
Who Targets Me is a watchdog organisation that brings transparency to political advertising — monitoring how parties use targeted ads to reach, persuade and mobilise voters. In the run-up to the 2024 UK General Election, the paid media battle between parties was one of the defining, least-visible stories of the campaign. The challenge wasn't a lack of data; it was making sense of it fast enough to matter.
THE CONTEXT
THE CHALLENGE
Political ad spend moves daily, across multiple platforms, and only becomes a story when someone can say what changed, why it matters, and what it reveals about a party's strategy. Who Targets Me needed a partner who could do three things at once: track the numbers reliably week on week, interpret the tactics behind them, and package the findings so they were ready for journalists, public campaigns and the organisation's own channels.
WHAT WE DID
We ran a programme of rolling, weekly paid media intelligence across the campaign period. Each week we tracked how much each party was spending, where, and on which platforms — then translated the movement into a clear narrative: who was scaling up, who was retreating, who was winning share of voice, and what their targeting and messaging choices revealed about strategy.
The work combined hard tracking with interpretation. It wasn't enough to report that spend had gone up; the value was in explaining that, for example, a party doubling-down on retaining existing supporters signalled defensiveness, while another going hard on locational targeting signalled an offensive land-grab for seats.
STRATEGIC APPROACH
Three principles shaped the work:
Comparative, not absolute. A single spend figure tells you little. The insight lived in week-on-week change and share-of-voice shifts — which party was growing or shrinking relative to the field, and what that implied about confidence and strategy.
Tactics, not just totals. Beyond headline spend, we read the how: targeting strategy (broad lookalike acquisition vs. narrow CRM retention), demographic and locational appeals (younger vs. older audiences; cities vs. towns vs. villages), and the narrative moves inside the creative itself.
Built for onward use. Every weekly output was structured so it could become something else — a blog, an infographic, a journalist briefing, a social carousel. Insight was packaged for distribution from the start.
OUTPUTS & DELIVERABLES
Rolling weekly spend tracking across Meta and Google, showing what went up or down and what it meant for each party's share of the advertising landscape.
Weekly insight write-ups combining cross-platform commentary, platform-specific breakdowns, and tactical analysis of how the leading contenders were targeting and appealing to voters.
A repeatable weekly content format to drive onward production — covering the changing spend landscape, comparative weekly commentary on share of voice, and tactical insight on targeting and demographic shifts.
Example weekly copy and content guidance to inform blogs, infographics and social assets — including suggested key charts, templated stat-led graphics, and shareable carousel formats.
THE RESULTS
The analysis surfaced the kind of insight that drives a story. In the final week of the campaign, weekly Meta spend across parties reached its highest point of the entire campaign at over £1.3m, as parties piled in to chase undecided voters.
The standout move was Reform UK, which scaled its Meta budget more aggressively than anyone — up over 400% in a week — concentrating spend on a handful of key constituencies. At the same time, Labour's share of spend was quietly eroding: dominant at the start, its lead narrowed as rivals activated and outpaced its growth.
That kind of insight didn't just sit in a report — it travelled. The weekly intelligence directly informed public-facing campaigns and fed national media coverage, including The Independent, BBC Radio and Sky News, with the insight packs equipping the PR agency to secure that coverage.
Alongside the media work, our content guidance sustained a steady cadence of weekly blogs and social assets that turned complex spend data into accessible, public-interest stories.