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Paid Search and its role in the 2008 Presidential Election

posted by Melanie DAcchioli @ Friday, August 29, 2008 - 4:29 PM
If the truth is that America is shifting media usage from traditional media to online, and media does, in fact, affect voters in a national election, then Senator Barack Obama is making strides toward becoming the next President of the United States.

According to many web marketing newsletters, Obama’s technology usage and internet savvy in the 2008 Presidential Election is spectacular. Obama used text messaging not only to announce his decision on a vice presidential nominee to registered mobile users exclusively, before anyone else knew; but also, to build up this list of mobile phone numbers for use in the campaign down the line. He even created his own social networking site, My.BarackObama.com.

However, according to the Wall Street Journal yesterday, Obama seems to have missed the boat in one of the most vital, if not THE most vital, of internet marketing tactics behind Senator John McCain: Paid Search.

In this day and age, when just about half of the Internet population use search engines on a daily basis, and around 60% of higher-income and/or more educated Internet users perform searches daily (PEW/Internet 2008), it is extremely important to utilize paid search strategies and tactics as part of an online marketing strategy for the presidential campaign.

Aside from the sheer statistics of search engine users, according to a recent PEW Research Center study, 24% of Americans get at least some of their information about the 2008 political campaigns from the internet, up from 13% in the 2004 election.

In light of these facts, McCain has found a loophole in Obama’s supposedly superior internet marketing strategy. Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal article described, "As of Wednesday, a Google search for "Joe Biden" or even just "Biden" resulted in a prominently displayed ad labeled "Joe Biden on Obama" that links to Sen. McCain's site. There, a video begins playing that shows Sen. Biden criticizing Sen. Obama during the Democratic primaries."

McCain is utilizing a common strategy of paid search advertising, buying competitor’s brand names, product names, etc. (in this case- actual names). This strategy is useful not only so that a marketer can be sure to show up on the results page when a competitor’s term is searched on, but more importantly because with paid search, the advertiser has control over where to send users who click the ad. Thus, McCain’s use of a landing page with an “attack ad” video at the forefront is a smart use of competitive paid search tactics.

And McCain didn’t solely focus on this “ambush” style of paid search. He also bought terms such as “U.S. economy” and “housing crisis” and sent users to landing pages explaining his platform on key issues.

While Obama is ahead in the use of the extremely new, innovative, savvy technology such as social media and mobile advertising, it seems that he may have lost sight of some age-old, potentially more important tactics on the way.

A spokesperson for the Obama campaign said, "Thanks to our millions of online supporters who frequently visit our Web site and other social-networking sites, unlike other campaigns, BarackObama.com already has extremely high organic search engine rankings, which helps us limit the number of terms where we need to use paid advertising to have a presence.” While this may be true, he is still missing out on the opportunity to utilize the benefits of paid search- its versatility and ability to drive users with specific messaging to a specific location and funnel them exactly where the campaign wants them to go.

And with the emergence of this criticism in such a highly esteemed paper as the Wall Street Journal, and the benefit of the immediacy of paid search advertising, it will be interesting to see how the internet landscape of this Presidential election continues to play out.

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