• by Emily Williams , Op-Ed Contributor, July 9, 2015

Last month, the National Journal Magazine published an article about the emerging role of Facebook as “the single most important tool” for digital campaigns in the 2016 race for the White House. I couldn’t agree more.

Thanks to powerful new features unveiled since the 2012 campaign, Facebook now offers a far more customized and sophisticated splicing of the American electorate. And, for the first time in presidential politics, it can serve up video to those thinly targeted sets of people. 

In the past, campaigns – from presidential to statewide to local – used Facebook primarily for list building and GOTV, and their go-to medium for persuasion messaging was television. In this cycle, the ability to deliver targeted video to niche audiences is a potential game changer, particularly for smaller campaigns who cannot afford to buy broadcast. On average, a video view on Facebook costs mere pennies.

Now, campaigns can serve not only emotional video creative right into users’ Facebook newsfeeds, they can create custom content for different, sometimes harder-to-reach audiences, and actually measure how people respond to it.

Political operatives have long seen local newscasts as one of the most effective outlets for TV ads because viewers are ripe for persuasion as they consume the news. Increasingly, Facebook is such an outlet. In a recent Pew study, a whopping 61% of millennials said they keep up with politics via Facebook, making it their top news source.

"We are guaranteeing you will reach the right person at the right time and eliminate the waste that you might find in email marketing, certainly in TV advertising," says Eric Laurence, who is in charge of political advertising on Facebook. "That's really the power of Facebook targeting."

It’s not just political campaigns that are using Facebook advertising to deliver targeted messages to niche groups. Last summer, the Ford Motor Company used Facebook ads to reach and engage U.S. Hispanics during periods of peak excitement surrounding soccer. The video ads integrated soccer and the Ford messaging and were shown to the Hispanic audience at specific times during relevant games to drive the second-screen experience.

Ford’s highly targeted video ad campaign was successful in engaging the U.S. Hispanic audience. Between June and September 2014:

• 27% of all US Hispanics aged 18 and over were reached

• 6 times higher click-through rate compared to the average Facebook automotive campaign during the same time period

• 71% completion rate of video views, of which 97% were on mobile

As Facebook’s video platform generates momentum with political campaigns and brands alike, it’s important to keep in mind that this isn’t about one medium replacing another. Most successful campaigns are integrated and multi-channel, layering Facebook on top of TV and mail, and running in coordination with email and mobile. Above all else, successful campaigns start from clear goals. From goals follow strategy and then tools. I'm excited to continue to experiment with this increasingly powerful tool in the kit.