• by Philip Rosenstein , Staff Writer, January 17, 2017

“Facebook was directly appropriate for our operation,” Gerrit Lansing, chief digital officer at the Republican National Committee told MediaPost’s Marketing Politics Conference on Tuesday morning.

Speed was of major importance — and the Trump campaign was on top of that aspect of digital advertising. The campaign was going through between 40,000 to 60,000 ad variations per day, with 175,000 iterations on the best day of the campaign.

Lansing explained ads would be optimized every five minutes on Facebook.

Facebook advertising from the Trump campaign perspective also used a novel approach -- what Lansing termed “direct persuasion” advertising. Combining a direct response ad, such as selling a hat or a perk, with a persuasion video was hugely successful.  

In the end, the importance of Trump’s digital operation was such that “by the end of the campaign, Brad Parscale, Trump’s digital director, was essentially the campaign manager."