Home Office spent £35k on ads to deter small boat migrants, but targeted tourists instead — Adverts told people ‘don’t risk your life’ and ‘seek asylum in the first safe country you reach’
by marketrent
Home Office spent £35k on ads to deter small boat migrants, but targeted tourists instead — Adverts told people ‘don’t risk your life’ and ‘seek asylum in the first safe country you reach’
by marketrent
5 comments
University of Edinburgh lecturer Ben Collier led research that found the Home Office paid £35k for Meta ad targeting to reach some audiences online:^1
>Targets were primarily selected by language, including Arabic, Kurdish and Persian, and by “interests” including Afghan football and cricket, various Syrian cities, Iranian cinema, “Iraqi cuisine” and Vietnamese radio stations.
>[Between January 2021 and September 2022] some adverts were sent to people where online data suggested they were away from their homes or families, but others were shown to Facebook and Instagram users who live and work around Brussels, Calais and Dunkirk.
>[…]
>Dr Collier said the campaign was part of a wider “nudge approach” aiming to influence behaviour, which had become increasingly “fear-based and nastier” from the Home Office in recent years.
>Messages repeated in several languages told people: “Even if you survive an illegal boat trip, UK laws will not allow you to work or earn money.”
>Researchers studied data showing where the adverts appeared on people’s feeds and pages and found that some were seen as far away as Mexico, Jordan, Oman and Bangladesh – “clearly hitting an unintended audience of holidaymakers or business travellers”.
A report by the Scottish Institute for Policing Research found that the campaign had been seen by speakers of Arabic, Pashto, Vietnamese, and Albanian in locations like Brussels, where “their French-speaking neighbours will not see it.”
^1 https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/asylum-seeker-adverts-small-boats-facebook-b2391097.html
Standard for our level of competence in Government.
*Some* targeted tourists. The methods they’re using sound fairly reasonable – combining language spoken with recent location data. You’re never going to get 100% accuracy with online advertising.
It’s also literally impossible to tell if this was effective. Well, I guess you could track how many people who see the ads later complete an action on the gov.uk website that only those who recently arrived would do, but even then you’d have nothing to compare it to – unless you also targeted the same demographics with completely irrelevant ads like “look at this cute puppy” to try and find differences in the data – but that would take years and millions of pounds to generate significant data, and it still wouldn’t be very reliable.
This is monumentally stupid and someone who came up with this should be sacked.
The effect of this is exactly like “Just say no” drug campaigns.
Basically, this is having an effect opposite of the intended. People who might not have been aware of migrants crossing to the UK, now know it is a trip worth risking their life for and now may actually be interested in going to the UK.
“Browse r/unitedkingdom for a bit.”
I guarantee nobody would show up then.