Ink Different. On the subject of cults of personality and Obama tattoos: “Shouldn’t this guy at least have waited for the general? Imagine someone walking around right now with a Lieberman tat.”
Guest article! First in a long time, too. In an online discussion a few days ago, friend-of-e.politics Riche Zamor posted a set of tips for getting the best results out of a pay-per-click advertising campaign. He was responding to a question about free ads an organization was running via a Google Grant, but these would seem to apply to PPC ad runs across the board. BTW, Riche will be taking a leave of absence from CITI over the next few months to run a Congressional campaign in Alaska — an awesome opportunity.
Tips for Pay-Per-Click Advertising Campaigns
By Riche Zamor
Here are a few tips I recommend when you are running PPC campaigns:
Hot damn, we’re gettin’ close to conference season and it’s time to warm up those mad panelist skillz before things get completely out of hand. Alan Rosenblatt’s Internet Advocacy Center discussion on online advertising next week should be a good start: Michael Bassik, Judith Freeman, Justin Perkins, the Good Doktor Rosenblatt and I will be looking at best practices for running advocacy ads while also answering questions and generally tossing ideas around in productive fashion. I’m not sure why I’m on the panel, other than for comedic relief, but the others actually know what they’re talking about so it should be a good event.
Next up, the Politics Online Conference hits town in only three weeks, and e.politics is downright stoked: take a look at the list of breakout sessions and you’ll see some real goodies there, including a panel I’ll be moderating on the question “Does Good Design Matter?” (Guess where e.politics stands on the issue.) You’ll also get a chance to meet and mingle with a ton of your peers in the field, including (perish the thought) some from the Other Side. And you’ll get to see who takes home the hardware this time around (to inspire the kids, I’ll be sporting last year’s Golden Dot on a chain around my neck, as a good hype-man should).
But wait, there’s more! If you’re among the first 500 callers and you mention e.politics, you’ll get an extra $50 off the already low, low registration fee. Actually, just go to the signup page and enter the discount code MINUS50 at the checkout and you’ll be taken care of — and don’t forget who brought you the sugar. If you just can’t get enough e.politics (and who possibly could), in March I’ll also be speaking at South by Southwest in Austin and the Nonprofit Technology Conference in New Orleans (clearly it ain’t too hard to drag me to a party city). Swing on by and say howdy if you’re at any of these events.
Read Scott Martin passes along a new site he’s running that tracks online advertising by the presidential candidates. The data and analysis both look good, and when I asked where the information came from, Read replied:
Yahoo, MSN, AOL, many others use them to provide tearsheets for the clients. Huge untapped potential in political campaigns (chiefly in research, IMHO).
The site has a blog that comments on current campaigns and an Ad of the Day feature, though I’m not quite sure of the distinction between the two; might be better to combine them. An example of why the site’s navigation is overall a little rough. Cool information, though — check it out and see what you think.
Citizen media, yet another example of why I love thee: a genius parody of the Obama Yes We Can video, this one featuring John McCain.
Call me emotionally stunted, but while the original sends a shiver down the spine in a couple of places, the fundamental insincerity of the McCain version suits my style so much better.
Early this morning, Sen. Barack Obama sent the first of three text messages to supporters who’ve signed up to his messaging program and live in the D.C. area. It’s a jam-packed message, starting out with an Obama quote, then asking supporters to forward the text to their friends. Most importantly, the text provides an 866 number to call to find your polling location. All you’d have to do is click on the number on your cellphone to make the free call.
Jose has detail about the campaign’s ability to target messages by zip code, and also about how quiet they’re being about the size of their list and its response rate. Texting for turnout isn’t an original idea, but this campaign seems focused on implementing it well — a part of the campaign that future online political professionals will look to as a model?
Maybe nobody else thinks this is interesting, but to me it’s fun to realize that as I write this, I’m mixing the oldest and newest widely adopted wireless communications media: radio and wifi. I’m a-sittin’ in my chair, pulling the ‘net from a wireless hub hooked to a cable modem while also listening to WAMU radio’s live election coverage. I could stream the NPR station over the ‘net, but it’s easier to listen to if it’s on in the background. And for live local coverage, Kojo, Jonetta and the gang are fun as hell and also happen know a whole lot about local politics, so you can learn a ton. I’m going to check out the Post’s live online coverage in a bit; they seem to have poured a lot of resources into it. Anyway, thanks Mr. Marconi, for the wireless. Update: The Post thing is basically TV on the web; if you like TV news coverage hosted by print journalists, you’re their demographic.
While we’re on the subject of social networking, here’s a quick Facebook tip: on a confence call today, Farra Trompeter mentioned that a she’d received Facebook message from a pro-Obama group she’s joined, asking her to change her Facebook Status to “voting for Obama.” I’m sure this isn’t new, but I hadn’t thought about it enough before to see it as a communications tool. Clever, since regular Facebook users see their friends’ Status messages (“Colin is…”) often.
If you’re looking for guidance on using MySpace for advocacy and/or politics, I just found a bunch of it: Heather Mansfield at Diosa communications has assembled 42 separate pieces of advice and is adding more every week. She’s clearly a social networking enthusiast and these tips sound like the product of solid experience. Some of them (“#34: Use MySpace to drive individuals to your e-advocacy campaigns”) will be familiar to readers of more general guides, but many of them are more subtle and will go a long way to helping an organization or campaign avoid mistakes and get the most out of their investment in social networking sites.
Interesting development in the Dems’ race for online dollars — in the past few days, the Clinton campaign has started advertising for donations on Washington Post online properties, specifically the Post.com and Slate (I haven’t spotted them on Newsweek.com yet). The ads I’ve seen are “pop-unders,” those pop-up ads that you don’t necessarily see when you’re on the page but that are left behind in a small window when you click away. The ads are Flash-based, with a small amount of animated text, and they specifically ask for a $50 donation. The landing page is pure fundraising, with no persuasion or non-monetary list-building to act as a distraction.
The Post online ad serving system is capable of slicing and dicing readers to target by location and (for the registration-requiring Post.com site) demographic, so I can’t tell if these are running nationally or only in the DC area. Either strategy is plausible, since ads on Slate and on the Post political section are likely to reach politically interested liberals around the country and perhaps expats (note the link for overseas Democrats), while it’s also possible that the campaign is targeting local readers in advance of the Potomac Primary. Since these are specifically fundraising ads, I suspect it’s a national or completely open run.
The Democratic presidential contest finally landed in DC over the last couple of weeks, with the Clinton and Obama campaigns gunning for a share of the rich lode of Democratic voters in the diverse neighborhoods of Mount Pleasant and Adams Morgan. Obama struck first and hard last Saturday morning, with a parade down Mount Pleasant Street complete with a Latin band in an open-back work truck (stand-up bass, vocals, guitar, percussion) and a few cars along for company (note: only one Volvo visible, in this case a fairly battered 240 wagon). Good targeting: at 11 on a cold Saturday morning, the Mount Pleasant yup/hipsters haven’t even slipped on their skinny jeans yet, and the sidewalk traffic is largely Salvodoran.
Since then, the campaigns’ supporters have hung out on local street corners at various high-traffic times, waving signs and soliciting honks from supportive drivers — Clintonistas retook Mount Pleasant Street with a powerful infantry contingent a week after the Obama raid, while a ton of Obamans were out on U Street Friday evening, targeting partiers heading to Adams Morgan. In my neighborhood at least, the bulk of the public Clinton supporters have been latin women, while the Obamaramans tend tend to be younger and more nonprofity. Of course, we’re looking at an online component here, since the small sample of volunteers I talked with had organized via email, getting a neighborhood rendezvous time from the campaign and then dividing up the area in person once they met.
The TV people tell me that DC’s going to go for Obama, a not unexpected result — while this may not quite be Chocolate City any more, it sure as hell ain’t vanilla either — but Clinton’s folks aren’t giving up on on latin voters, who’ve held strong for her in other areas. Tuesday’s gonna be fun.
At Thursday’s IPDI-sponsored Super Tuesday postmortem, John McCain consultant and former Bushie Mark McKinnon talked quite a bit about how the web has changed the the business of video advertising, particularly the explosion of online-only video. After the event, I asked him whether McCain’s much-noted online-only video ad strategy had been intentional or was a reaction to circumstances. He replied that the campaign had had a “robust” multi-channel video strategy at the beginning of the campaign, but that McCain’s implosion over the summer had forced them to focus on the web over TV because it was free. During the full panel discussion, McKinnon also made the point that the online video ads haven’t been intended for a mass audience as much as for journalists, leading to free exposure on TV news and helping to shape reporters’ opinions about the race.
McKinnon said something else about digital video that I hadn’t considered before: until 2004, if you wanted to show the candidate or other staff member a TV ad that was still under construction, you’d need to ship a tape and put it in front of him. In 2004, easy video compression made it possible to send over that same ad via email, vastly speeding up the editing and approval process. He noted that McCain’s web and television commercials this cycle have been the product of a team of four people, shooting video themselves and editing it on their own computers. Full studio rigs? Apparently no longer required.
Also on the subject of video, Ana Marie Cox pointed to citizen-generated YouTube clips as driving the campaigns to improve their own ads, since they’re now competing with a vast number of talented amateurs. The unintended consequences of social media! McKinnon agreed with her and said that campaigns now also have a harder and harder time breaking through to reach increasingly skeptical voters — we can add voter cynicism to the list of reasons that political television advertising is steadily declining in effectiveness.
