Targeting and/or tailoring⁈ A theoretical framework and its application to political social media advertising

Despite the widespread use of data-driven campaigning (DDC), there is limited conceptual clarity and empirical understanding of how political parties employ the advertising strategies of targeting (deciding which audiences to reach with ads) and tailoring (adapting ad content to specific target groups) on social media. Little is known about how these strategies, individually or in combination, influence outcome variables such as impressions of an ad, a key metric for assessing the visibility of ads in campaigns. In this paper we provide a novel theoretical conceptualization of the related yet distinct strategies of targeting and tailoring and demonstrate how they can be measured separately. We apply our framework to the 2021 German election campaign on the Meta platforms Facebook and Instagram. We do this by analyzing all ads (n = 4760) purchased by six German parties and their top candidates during the final four weeks of the campaign. We combine multi-modal manual content analysis data of ad tailoring with the Meta Ad Targeting Dataset and the Meta Ad Library to measure the two concepts independently. Our findings show that targeting and tailoring are distinct theoretical concepts that are rarely combined in practice. German parties tend to use these strategies independently. Targeting and tailoring have separate effects on ad impressions, with targeting showing a significant association while tailoring does not. These results underscore the importance of treating targeting and tailoring as distinct phenomena within DDC and provide a foundation for future research on the strategic use of social media advertising in political campaigns.