After reading some of the case studies from this week’s theme of online advertising, it’s hard not to accuse any candidate that doesn’t allocate a decent amount of funds/energy/time/strategy to online advertising of being foolish. Aside from online ads yielding a high return on their investment, advertising online allows for some pretty incredible micro-targeting opportunities.
Josh Koster used Senator Al Franken’s campaign as an example of successful long-tail nanotargeting, which is the process of using campaign messages and finding the right niches to execute those messages. Koster explains that this process is two-fold: the use of persuasion and the use of acquisition. These two strategies are pretty much how they sound. Persuasion involves finding your niche market, and hitting them with your best persuasive message in “their” space (in the case of the Franken campaign, people that used the Internet to research gas stations with cheap prices or fuel efficient cars saw Franken ads about his position on energy efficiency). Secondly, acquisition uses online ads as a way to implement a call to action strategy (again, in the case of the Franken campaign, they recruited interns using Facebook ads). In another case study, Koster, alongside Tyler Davis, described how nanotargeting directly contributed to the demise of Lou Dobbs’ tenure on CNN. Koster and Davis’ consulting company, hired by clients supporting immigration reform, put pressure on the network for supporting Dobbs’ xenophobic rhetoric in the immigration debate by reaching out to CNN employees through Facebook’s capability to target advertisements based on workplace disclosure.
Online advertising isn’t reserved for the high-profile candidates and nationwide campaigns. As Kate Kaye from ClickZ underscores in her article about the January 2010 special election for Virginia State Senate, the affordability and practicality of online advertising is redefining the way that third-party groups support candidates, particularly in down-ballot races. Resources that might have been spent on traditional advertising like television and print are now being allocated for advertising online. Another advantage for down-ballot races is Google’s Mobile Ads that allow campaigns to advertise on mobile devices. CNN’s Eric Kuhn points out that this is especially useful for Election Day campaigning if voters are standing in line, phones in hand, possibly doing last minute research of barely-known candidates who may not have been able to hand them a piece of Election Day lit.
Source amnesia was not a term I had seen or heard before, but Julian Sanchez explores how political campaigns can exploit this psychological condition. According to Koster, voters remember the information, but cannot recall where got the information. This is an interesting dynamic for any political campaign, as it can be useful for some slick maneuvering by the opposition to plant negative messages without being held completely accountable. Of course, there is also a positive angle, if you’re the side doing the planting!
As if the articles and case studies weren’t enough to convince stubborn offline politicos to wake up to the world of online advertising, Google’s Public Sector Blog covered a report (another product of Josh Koster) providing evidence for the effectiveness of online advertising. By conducting a survey before and after an online-only advertising campaign, researchers were able to gauge the impact of the ads, as well as ad recall. Unsurprisingly, the online ad campaign worked like a charm and now they have the survey data to prove it.
No comments:
Post a Comment