Analysis of Snapchat Political Ads Library

Project Purpose

I will be looking at the Snapchat Political Ads Library which Snapchat has made publicly available since 2018.I will specifically be looking at what political organizations use Snapchat the most for advertising, which ads make the most impressions, targeted age/geographic groups, and what kinds of ads were more prevalent in 2020 around election time.

Political ads on social media have always been pretty controversial. Facebook has refused to fact check their political ads and after much hate they finally decided in early November to ban political ads all together. Twitter on the other hand banned political ads pretty early on back in 2019. I thought that taking a look at Snapchat's political ads would be particularly interesting because Snapchat claims to fact check all of their political ads and in the recent election it is said that they were actively going after political advertising rather than stepping away from it like Facebook and Twitter have.

Data Source

The data that I will be using comes directly from the Snapchat website: https://www.snap.com/en-US/political-ads/.

Snapchat regards an ad as 'political' if it is election, advocacy, or issue related.

Some information on the column names that will be beneficial to know (see here for full list):

Currency Code - local currency used to pay for advertisement
Spend - amount (in local currency) spent on advertisement
Impressions - number of times the ad has been viewed
Organization Name - organization responsible for creating the Ad
CandidateBallotInformation - candidate/ ballot initiative associated with the Ad
PayingAdvertiserName - entity providing the funds for the Ad
GenderCode - targeted gender
AgeBracket - target age group
Interests - interests of targeted audience
Advanced Demographics - 3rd party data segments targeting criteria used in Ad

Note: You'll notice that for my analysis, I'm mainly focusing on the Paying Advertiser, rather than the Organization Name because since I will be looking at spending and impressions, it made more sense for me to focus on who was actually spending the money on these ads.

Additional Resources

I was not familiar with some of these political organization so I used several resources to learn a bit more about their affiliations and what they stand for. If you want to learn more about these organizations, here are the resources I used:

https://www.pacronym.org/ - remove Trump from office campaign
https://www.anotheracronym.org/about/ - movement for the progressive movement
https://truthinitiative.org/who-we-are - anti-tobacco campaign
https://collectivepac.org/about/ - elect more people from the Black Community to seats of power
https://www.benjerry.com/values/issues-we-care-about/get-the-dough-out-of-politics/ - I was surprised to see Ben & Jerry's appear so often in my analysis because I didn't realize they had any sort of political campaigns - take a deeper look here

I also used statista to get some general Snapchat insights - countries with most users, age group with highest users, etc.

Feel free to visit my portfolio to view the whole analysis with code.