Comments on: Electioneers Need Some (PPC) Campaign Management

By: The Old, Ignorant Politician’s Guide to Search Marketing for Your Election Campaign | Acquisio Search Blog

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 15:18:55 +0000

[...] doing it? Last year, towards the latter end of dual American and Canadian federal election races, I wrote a post about the state of PPC advertising use by the candidates on both sides of the border – I didn’t have a method of data collection or anything statistically significant, I just tried [...]

By: Best of The Web - Blog Posts 2008

Best of The Web - Blog Posts 2008 — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 05:40:54 +0000

[...] Electioneers Need Some (PPC) Campaign Management on Aquisio.com. Naoise Osborne takes a look at the US and Canadian election campaigns and their use (or lack thereof) of Adwords marketing, trashes the Valleywag post from the other week, and does his own mini-analysis, the results of which are surprising. [...]

By: Best of The Web - Blog Posts and Articles Of Year 2008

Best of The Web - Blog Posts and Articles Of Year 2008 — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 04:47:38 +0000

By: Naoise

Naoise — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 18:04:07 +0000

I wasn’t surprised in 2004, but I’ll admit I am surprised in 2008 – it’s not as though Google is something only geeks know about anymore, and much more than this, it’s not as though Google’s advertising reach and influence is something only online marketers know about. They went public, they’ve made profits, they’re freakin’ huge, and it’s to the point now where Joe Public (except maybe Madame Palin, but I digress) understands the concept of contextual ads being triggered by search phrases at Google.

It has gone mainstream, and yet somehow these big budgets and big thinkers who’s main job is to figure out how to reach people who need help making up their minds about something never considered the people who are actually out there researching, asking resources to help them make up their minds.

It’s mind boggling. Early in the campaign cycle a friend of mine emailed one of the candidates to offer his help in exactly this realm, but received no reply. Next election I think he plans to be a little more aggressive in his approach.

In Canada it’s a bit more difficult with elections being called on such short notice – with the bureaucracy of our government it’s not at all surprising that nobody has the time to implement such a campaign – but that just emphasizes the idea that the research and leg-work should be done ahead of time, with some PPC paused and at the ready, if you ask me.

By: Terry Howard

Terry Howard — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 21:15:25 +0000

I’m not surprised with how out of touch these campaigns traditionally are. It always seems like they think a political campaign is somehow different than a PR or marketing campaign, so they hire only political campaign experts who work full steam, what, every 2 years tops? They dump excessive amounts of money into radio and TV with ads that differ so little from each other and every other low level campaign running that it all becomes background noise. They bite each other’s taglines (everyone is about change), logos, anything to look LIKE the other guy, not different or better.

The best is when you hear about the Obama campaign crooning about how high tech they are that they used SMS, and the McCain camp is all smiles about their innovative email campaigns. That’s great guys, but local boat manufacturers and board game companies are out there going direct to person in social media and viral campaigns, making you guys with your “war chests” look like amateurs.

That’s the problem, it’s thought of as “political campaigns” and “war chests” when it should be “marketing initiatives” and “campaign budgets”. They need to hire marketing experts and tell the “political campaign managers” to take a hike.