spinofflive
a black background with dollar signs and the logos of meta and google
Digital ad spending is a glimpse of where parties are focusing their resources. (Image: Archi Banal)

PoliticsOctober 20, 2023

Who spent most on online ads this election?

a black background with dollar signs and the logos of meta and google
Digital ad spending is a glimpse of where parties are focusing their resources. (Image: Archi Banal)

Data released by Meta and Google tells us which parties, candidates and lobby groups were shelling out to show up in your feeds.

Chlöe Swarbrick spent at least $10,700 on digital advertising during her winning campaign to remain MP for Auckland Central, data from Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, shows. That’s more than double the spend of her closest rival, National’s Mahesh Muralhadir. 

That’s just one of the telling data points accessible in Meta’s Ad Library, which allows anyone to see how much money was spent on political advertising during the 2023 election campaign period. The tool offers a sense of what different parties prioritise and who has the most money (Act). 

Facebook and Instagram’s ad targeting is ultra-specific – you can choose to show ads only to  particular age groups and genders, people who have shown interest in topics like “the environment” or “live music” through previous social media activity, and to target specific  postcodes. Selling its massive audience to advertisers is the main way that Meta makes money – and that includes from political advertisers. 

As part of a push for transparency over concerns of foreign influence in elections, both Meta and Google now release information about political ads on their platforms. Through Facebook’s Ad Library and Google Ad Transparency, it’s possible to search for particular advertisers and see which demographics and areas they are targeting and how much money they’re spending. 



It’s immediately clear that Act outspends all the other parties, with $334,900 of Meta advertising going to 844 separate ads on Facebook and Instagram. For a smaller party, that amount of money is particularly significant – Act spent 33% more than the second-biggest spender, Labour, and had 11 MPs elected to Labour’s 34. 

Some parties spent more money on their leaders' personal Facebook pages than others. While Act forked out $17,800 on promoting David Seymour’s Facebook page, and National spent $43,000 on Christopher Luxon’s, the Greens spent nothing on Marama Davidson or James Shaw’s personal pages, and nor did Labour on Chris Hipkins’. Debbie Ngarewa-Packer and Rawiri Waititi spent just under $3,000 combined, Winston Peters spent $1,500 and Raf Manji spent $438. 

It's worth noting that there are a number of limitations to this data, because it’s not always completely clear how Facebook and Google tag advertising, and there are some limits to how easily the date range can be navigated (Facebook clusters its data in 90-day chunks, which means these numbers will be slightly off). 

More money goes into Meta advertising than Google; only Labour, National, Act and New Zealand First spent enough to show up on Google's transparency dashboard, with Act again spending hundreds of thousands of dollars more than the other parties. The full ad transparency page shows that 90% of this spending was on video content (shown via YouTube), and the biggest day of spending was on 25 September, when the party spent $21,400 on advertising. 



The election advertising period starts three months before the election, when there is a spending cap for all parties advertising. Parties are allowed to spend $1,388,000 for contesting the party vote, plus $32,600 for each electorate candidate – an incentive for even minor parties to run electorate candidates so they can use the maximum amount of money, if they have it. 

Independent electorate candidates are allowed to spend $32,600 too. Third party promoters – the likes of trade and taxpayers’ unions – can spend $391,000, and unregistered promoters can spend $15,700 before they have to register. These costs include paid labour, design, distribution and publication costs, so the amount spent on digital advertising comes from the same pool as that of physical billboards or design agencies. 

Some of the posts New Zealand's political parties paid for on Facebook

While the amount of money spent on digital advertising is only one piece of the overall campaign, it’s an indication of a party’s priorities, and gives a sense of total spending – we won’t know more detail about the amount spent until next year, when parties are required to file expense returns for all advertising spending during the election period (third party promoters only need to file if they spent more than $100,000 during the campaign). Registered political parties also have to file annual returns of how many donations and loans they received, and report the name of every contributor who gives more than $15,000; when these have been submitted for 2023, there will be more information about just how much money each party was working with during the campaign. 

In the meantime, one indication of which electorate seats were being prioritised can be found through the Meta data. Many candidates for electorate seats don’t spend any money on Meta advertising at all, but some do. Because of the hyper-specific geographic targeting, the amounts are much smaller than for the overall party vote, but this only makes differences more significant. While Chloe Swarbrick already has 80,000 followers on Facebook and 117,000 on Instagram, she still spent more than double her closest competitor, National's Mahesh Muralidhar, on promoting her campaign on these platforms – a sign that retaining the Auckland Central seat was really, really important to the Green Party. 



The Facebook data may also be a clue to how the party responded to internal polling – especially because spending more doesn't correlate completely to winning an electorate. In Wellington Central, Labour’s candidate Ibrahim Omer spent more than twice that of the Greens’ Tamatha Paul during campaigning, although Paul had a clear majority at the actual election. Because what Omer spent was much more than most candidates, this could be a sign that internal polling showed the Labour Party that their candidate was on track to lose, so they were willing to invest more resources in the outcome. 

Carlos Cheung, National’s victor in Mount Roskill, spent much more than Michael Wood – this could indicate that while Labour expected previous trends to hold in the seat, National was using more resources to change people’s minds. 

Meta spending paid off for Carlos Cheung and Dan Bidois; Mahesh Muralidhar and Simon O'Connor were outspent by their rivals – and lost

Looking at the spending of third party political actors is also an indication of where resourcing is in New Zealand politics. The biggest spender is Vote For Better NZ, a page that ran advertising against the current government throughout the election period, emphasising the role of party vote. An RNZ story about the third party promoters used Electoral Commission information to find that Vote for Better is run by Tim Barry; in a statement to RNZ he declined to be interviewed or say where his money is coming from, saying that Vote for Better’s data-focused posts could speak for themselves. However, those posts cannot speak for themselves any more – as of yesterday evening, the entire page had been deleted, although a record remains in the Ad Library.

"Vote for Better was a non-partisan, data driven campaign. I wanted to put information on issues that mattered most to New Zealanders in one place so voters could make an informed decision regarding the election. Hundreds of New Zealanders from up and down the country supported the campaign through donations, likes and sharing of the content," Barry told The Spinoff in a statement, not answering questions about how the campaign was funded in any greater detail.



Pages supporting the current government tended to focus only on specific policies, or overall concepts: Leading the Charge is an electric car lobby group that focused on not removing the clean car discount – it also ran a billboard campaign. Save Animals From Exploitation focused on live animal exports, which had been stopped by the Labour government. The NZCTU highlighted the role of Fair Pay Agreements, while activist group ActionStation promoted its Triple the Vote project. Right-wing group Hobson’s Pledge also ran a second page called We Belong Aotearoa, which had more explicit messaging around race. In general, much of this political advertising was focused only on specific policies, like the Clean Car Discount. Many of the third party advertisers, unlike the political parties and candidates, had very few followers on their Facebook and Instagram pages, so needed to pay for advertising to make people see their messages.  

Act may have spent the most on digital advertising, but runner-up is the strictly politically neutral Electoral Commission, which ran 271 advertisements on Google; as these are politically neutral, Google doesn’t display how much was spent. But on Meta, the commission paid $327,800 for advertising that encouraged people to vote. Democracy is accessible to every eligible voter, but reminding people of that does come at a cost. 

This article was updated to include a response from Vote for Better's Tim Barry. 

‘He mea tautoko nā ngā mema atawhai. Supported by our generous members.’
Liam Rātana
— Ātea editor
Keep going!
Image: Archi Banal
Image: Archi Banal

PoliticsOctober 20, 2023

Tory Whanau’s plan to save light rail? A holiday with Chris Luxon and Simeon Brown

Image: Archi Banal
Image: Archi Banal

Wellington mayor Tory Whanau spoke with Joel MacManus about how the new National government will affect the city’s transport plans. 

Wellington mayor Tory Whanau isn’t ready to give up on light rail for the capital, despite the incoming National government vowing to scrap the project. She wants to take the new prime minister and transport minister on holiday to see some trams and hopefully change their minds. 

“I’m still committed to light rail and I won’t rule it out,” she says. “I’ll be approaching the incoming government to sell the hell out of it,” she says.

“What I’m proposing is that me, Christopher Luxon, Simeon Brown and our local MPs head over to Canberra, Brisbane or Sydney and look at their really successful projects. I am putting it on the table, saying ‘look, let’s go check it out and talk to the people who’ve experienced it.’ The second they’re sworn in, I’m going to put in a request, hopefully for early next year.”

The business case for mass rapid transit to Newtown and the southern suburbs is currently being finalised by staff from the combined council-and-government transport programme Let’s Get Wellington Moving. “We’ll take that to [Brown] and show him the economic benefits. I’m going to ask that we try to get it back on the table. It’s my role to speak on behalf of residents, who want this.”

The relationship between Whanau and probable incoming transport minister Simeon Brown is likely to be a rocky one. Earlier this year, Whanau said she was “deeply concerned” about the prospect of Brown as transport minister. “If he became transport minister I’d be really upset about that. It would see our climate change efforts going backwards,” she told Bernard Hickey on The Spinoff’s When The Facts Change podcast. 

Tory Whanau, Simeon Brown and Christopher Luxon could be planning a trip together (Image: Archi Banal)

The two met before the election to try to patch some things over. “I met with him two months ago,” she says. “I told him: ‘Look, I’ve said things in the media, but if it’s likely you are the next government, I want to work collaboratively with you’. We acknowledged we had strong views and we were on opposing sides, but we committed to sit down and talk through some of these issues.

“I told him about how light rail will enable urban development with 20,000 new homes, and encourage more investment along the transport spine. He was listening. He didn’t agree to anything, but it was exactly the conversation we should be having.”

National’s transport manifesto for Wellington centred on cancelling the LGWM programme, though many of the component pieces will still go ahead, including grade separation at the Basin Reserve and a second Mount Victoria tunnel (though National wants four lanes of vehicle traffic while Labour wanted bus and bike priority).

The long-awaited Golden Mile upgrade is set to begin major construction early next year, and some minor works have already begun. The $139 million project was voted through by WCC and GWRC and will receive 51% funding from Waka Kotahi. It has been largely popular among public submitters, but has attracted strong backlash in some circles for its plans to restrict car access. 

When it emerged that the major construction contract was still unsigned, Brown said he would look to scrap the project if elected. Whanau said the signing was “literally days away”, and will be completed well before the new government is sworn in. “He won’t be able to cancel it. it’ll be well signed by the time they’re sworn in, as it should be… The Golden Mile has been voted through, it has followed the democratic process, and it would be irresponsible to unwind that now.”

“Change is really hard, especially for those on the right,” Whanau said. “The conservative view of the Golden Mile is that it is a waste of money and not good for retail. They don’t see pedestrianisation and reduced cars as a good idea because they want to keep cities relying on cars. But Wellington has voted and agrees that’s not the way forward for our city.”

An artist’s rendering of the Golden Mile

Before being elected mayor, Whanau was the Green Party chief of staff. Although she officially ran as an independent, she wears her political stripes openly. She’s naturally thrilled at the Green Party’s results on Saturday, especially in Wellington, where Julie Anne Genter and Tamatha Paul won the Rongotai and Wellington Central electorates. 

Both candidates were at Whanau’s house on election day before heading to a results party at Eva Beva. “The screaming in the pub was phenomenal, it was one of the best moments I’ve experienced, it was so electric,” she said. “We knew it was not a great result for the left, but Wellington city has spoken and it has chosen. There’s a silver lining, and Wellington city and the Green movement can bring hope.”

Green Party candidate Tamatha Paul won the Wellington Central electorate

Wellington’s Paneke Pōneke bike network plan is not expected to be affected by the new government. The 166km of bike lanes are funded mostly by council with some central government support through LGWM, but that funding has already been approved. “It would be incredibly difficult, if not impossible, for National to unwind that,” Whanau said. 

Whanau said she was feeling optimistic about working with National on some city issues, especially new funding tools for local governments such as congestion charging, infrastructure financing and sharing GST revenue on rates. 

‘Hutt Valley, Kāpiti, down to the south coast. Our Wellington coverage is powered by members.’
Joel MacManus
— Wellington editor
But wait there's more!