I was browsing the blogs this morning, specifically, TalkingPointsMemo, when I noticed this awesome ad from the Obama campaign on TPM’s front page.
Wow! An interactive map targeted to where I live! You can move the Obama “O” to your location, and it then asks you to put in your address and voila! Caucus Location! I was impressed, and began to wonder, are they doing this for every state? And is Hillary doing anything similar? In true blogger spirit, I set out to find out.
Crossposted at DailyKos and OpenLeft
First, a little blurb on online advertising and the sad under-usage of it by political campaigns versus the business world.
Back over the summer, as part of the New Organizing Institute’s intensive summer bootcamp, I was able to attend a seminar on online advertising put together by Google, which highlighted the disparity in ad spending by political campaigns versus business marketing campaigns. According to Google (and the information packet in front of me, sorry, no link :-)), users spent about 30% of their media consumption time online, versus about 60% watching television, a steadily falling amount. Advertisers are slow to catch on, though, and in 2004, business spent only 15% of advertising money online. Campaigns? A paltry 1%, versus almost 90% on television ads. More was spent on Newspaper ads than on online ones!
It was sad, especially when I learned that, with Google Adwords and similar services, you could target a campaign for a specific geographical area, for specific websites, specific keywords, that you could micro-target your message so precisely that the money would be incredibly well spent. Far, far better than you could do with even cable television. This works on not just national races but local ones too. The Google presenters showed us how this had been used in previous races, and the great potential for political campaigns to use the
And only one campaign has seemed to take notice in 2008 (albeit slowly). Barack Obama.
I tested some other search terms in Google and Yahoo! to see what ads would come up, and here is what I found.
“Barack Obama Minnesota” (another Feb 5th caucus state)
“Barack Obama California” or “Barack Obama” (as well as with other primary states such as Missouri and New York)
I decided to check it Hillary is doing anything similar with her web ads. I typed these search phrases into the two most popular search engines, Google, and Yahoo!
“Hillary Clinton” in Yahoo! = no ads.
“Hillary Clinton Kansas” in Yahoo! = no ads.
“Hillary Clinton” in Google = no ads.
“Hillary Clinton Kansas” in Google = no ads.
One did work though!
Searching for “Clinton” in Google got me this:
With the recent NY Times story, probably not the first thing people should be seeing when they search for Clinton.
Anyone else noticed these ads? I can’t get the graphic ones for other states, please post them if you can clip them. Any similar ones from other candidates? I’ve read McCain was using online ads the most of the R’s, so potentially, we might have the two most online advertising savvy candidates facing off this fall. Does that mean the first online negative ads? Oooo, just imagine!
