If you're in a safe seat during the upcoming federal election, you may barely notice the campaign at all.
But if you live in a hotly-contested electorate, get ready to be overwhelmed with billboards, pamphlets, and perhaps even a knock on the door from candidates.
It isn't going to end there.
Campaigners today have the ability to target voters more directly through digital and social media advertising, identifying them based on their online footprints.
Despite this being a common practice among most political parties, there's still a lot we don't know — and thanks to an exemption from Australia's privacy laws, they don't always have to tell you how they've captured your personal information.
But here's what we do know.
How the parties personalise their messaging
When it comes to online advertising, Google and Facebook are the big fish in the pond.
During an election, the platforms rake in millions in ad spending from political candidates in exchange for the promise of sophisticated tools to help them deliver their messages to voters.
That target could be based on their location. For example, in the New South Wales seat of Macquarie, Google's Transparency Report shows Labor has promoted multiple versions of the same YouTube ad to different people in the same electorate, depending on whether they lived in the Hawkesbury region or the Blue Mountains.
Parties could also target you by demographic.
Older women in the South Australian seat of Barker, held by Liberal's Tony Pasin, were more likely to see his Facebook ad about agriculture businesses in the region, according to the platform's ad library.
Younger men, however, were more likely to be served ads about roads.
Microtargeting is a boon to independent and minor party candidates who can't afford to spend big on mass-market television or radio advertising.
The Climate 200 group has been running Facebook ads for independents, such as Zali Stegall and Zoe Daniel, targeting people between 18 and 34 with messages positing the federal government has failed in its duty to protect future generations from climate change.
The group was established ahead of the 2019 Federal election by Simon Holmes à Court and has run Facebook ads in support of at least six candidates running in Liberal-held seats.
Industry groups will also capitalise on the election period and use microtargeting to put a spotlight on their own interests.
The ABC found the Pharmacy Guild, for example, has targeted ads about the cost of medicines to all demographics.
But younger people may be served an ad about being able to afford medicines and rent.
The dark side of microtargeting
The 2016 US presidential election sparked concerns that ad microtargeting could distort the political process and be weaponised by foreign agents.
Facebook reported that Russia-connected accounts spent more than $100,000 on Facebook ads during the 2016 campaign.
While attacks ads aren't new, there is also the possibility that domestic actors may target specific voters with divisive messages not easily visible to the rest of the electorate.
In Australia, for example, the ABC found prior to the 2019 federal election campaign that people "interested in Donald Trump" were served ads for a Facebook page attacking left-wing groups and political parties.
Major social media companies have since introduced advertiser verification processes, and others like TikTok and Twitter have banned political advertising altogether.
The two biggest players have also tweaked their political ad policies after years of controversy.
Google now says election ads can only be targeted based on age, gender, and location. Advertisers can also serve ads on Google's ad network based on the content someone is consuming online, a technique known as contextual target. This might be serving ads to someone watching videos about climate change, for example.
Facebook still allows interest or behavioural targeting but recently removed some sensitive interest categories, such as political beliefs.
How do they determine what my interests are?
Campaigns use market research and polling to help them narrow in on the types of people they think could be won over.
Daniel Stone, executive director of media strategy firm Principle Co, who has worked for a number of progressive political clients, says these choices are formed by a mix of "formal traditional public opinion research" and "intuition".
"The thing that is fairly commonly used [by campaigns is] do you have an interest in Australian news? Do you likely have kids?" he suggested, among other categories.
Facebook's ad targeting categories include whether users may have children.
But even in an average-sized electorate, going too niche with interest targeting risks making your pool very small and pricey.
"You start trying to hack into smaller and smaller groups out of that, number one, you're going to pay a lot more," said Phil Benedictus, founder of media agency Benedictus Media, which is working for some of the independent candidates including David Pocock, Kylea Tink, Zoe Daniel and Helen Haines.
"The second [issue is], the volume of ads you're going to serve is going to diminish. So there's a question as to how useful that kind of really uber granular stuff is."
While the Liberal Party and Labor Party campaign teams did not share what details they use to target ads, the Greens say they do not use behavioural targeting or interest targeting.
"When major political players are able to narrowcast extreme positions to niche audiences...they're able to circumvent public scrutiny, mislead voters and sway elections," Greens leader Adam Bandt said in a statement.
A Liberal Party campaign spokesperson noted all sorts of organisations utilise digital targeting tools, including the ABC, and said its campaign "will use a range of suitable techniques to communicate with Australians".
The Labor campaign did not respond by deadline.
One significant exception to targeting specific voter groups, for now at least, appears to be the campaign swimming in the most cash.
Clive Palmer's United Australia Party (UAP) has spent millions on digital advertising in the lead-up to the 2022 election campaign, and the ads are often targeted at either the whole of Australia or entire states.
Using the data the candidates already have
Demographic and location-based ad categories are not the only way parties can zero in on potential voters.
If an advertiser has email addresses for people it wants to target with an ad, for example, they can also be uploaded to Facebook.
Political parties have access to data on the electoral roll and also record voter interactions — such as when you email your senator, register for a newsletter, or sign a petition.
They can then use this data to try and draw insights about the electorate, as well as reach people about volunteering, donating or voting.
Data brokers, who claim special insight into consumer groups, also sell lists with emails and phone numbers.
Australian political parties are largely exempt from Australia's privacy laws and so have largely kept silent about their data practices.
However, Mr Stone described Australia's major parties as some of the "most established institutional players" when it comes to data collection about voters due simply to their scale and maturity.
Whereas smaller and newer parties may be more dependent on Facebook and Google data, he claimed "nothing in these databases is a wildcard that will change the course of an election on its own".
Does targeted advertising even work in an election?
The post-mortem which follows every election rarely provides certain answers about why one party was more successful, especially in regards to the value of money splashed on digital advertising campaigns.
"Can you empirically say with complete confidence that any election advertising in any form affects political outcome? Not really," Mr Stone said.
It's a point echoed by digital communications researcher Daniel Angus from Queensland University of Technology (QUT)
"Gauging effectiveness is one of the hardest things to do. You can't follow the person into the voting booth," Professor Angus said.
"So it means that there is a lack of verifiable data to know what particular message, what particular piece of advertising, say, was effective in creating a significant change."
Nevertheless, digital ad targeting is a component of virtually all modern election campaigns.
"Sometimes Facebook themselves over-inflate how good those tools are," Dr Angus said.
"The data that we're obtaining through our own research suggests that to be true as well, but in a toolkit of a lot of different techniques, I don't expect to see these forms of targeted advertising disappearing.
And sometimes an old-fashioned ad blitz is still the technique of last resort.
The golden goose for campaigners is the swing voter — the very same people often trying to avoid the election campaign entirely.
"That's why you ... get all the TV noise and radio noise," Mr Benedictus said.
"And in the last three weeks, it's because you've got this 10-20 per cent of people you've got to somehow move to do something."
How you can help fill in the gaps
We've been able to find the examples of ad targeting in this story thanks to Google and Facebook's ad transparency libraries, both introduced in Australia since the 2019 election.
But that only scratches the surface. There's a lot of ad targeting we can't see and goes undisclosed.
"[Facebook] don't offer you the same level of detail that the ad buyers get in terms of the various ways they select who gets to see the ad," Professor Angus said.
His research team is working to uncover more of that hidden campaigning, by encouraging Facebook users to download a plug-in that tracks all the ads they're served.
"While they're on the computer, it will sniff out any [Facebook] ads that they encounter," he said.
"When it detects that sponsored content, it packages it up, and it sends it off to our secure server."
The ABC is working with the Ad Observatory project to uncover the ad targeting strategies used by political parties in this campaign. But it can only work with your help. Find out more about joining the research project, here.
