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The Dawn Of Online Campaign Advertising
by Drew Clark
Every election season in America seems to be greeted as though it finally will be "the year of the Internet." But pundits' prognostications about the Internet's outsized role in the 1996 and 2000 presidential election years proved premature. That pattern may be repeating itself in 2004.
Internet journal writers known as bloggers have had the spotlight during some aspects of the 2004 presidential election. Many campaign observers say that bloggers pressured CBS to retract its recent story on President Bush's service in the National Guard, for example, and to apologize for using apparently forged documents to justify the story.
As an advertising medium, however, the Internet has been less than revolutionary this year. For every $100 that the campaigns of Republican President Bush and Democratic nominee John Kerry have spent on broadcast and cable television, they have put only $1 to Web ads, according to a study released Oct. 4 by the Pew Internet and American Life Project.
"It is not that the campaigns are ignoring the Internet; they are just not using advertising," said Michael Cornfield, the Pew senior research consultant who assembled the study by using "spidering" technology to monitor more than 2,000 commercial Web sites daily. "If the Internet it is a like Swiss Army knife, they are using the corkscrew and the knife, but not the scissors."
Democrats Tout Kerry's Campaign Performance
Both Republicans and Democrats have deep Web sites to raise money, post video of their latest television advertisements, promote campaign-style blogs written by supporters, urge volunteers to help others vote for their candidates and harvest e-mail addresses. By the end of September, Internet advertising was still minimal, but the past two weeks have marked a change.
The Kerry camp blasted a Web-based campaign that supporters and neutral observers have called a dramatic and innovative use of Internet advertising. The day of the Sept. 30 debate between Kerry and Bush in Coral Gables, Fla., the Democratic National Committee (DNC) launched a series of daylong Internet ad buys declaring Kerry the winner. The campaign continued the campaign after each of the presidential debates and the contest between Democratic vice-presidential nominee John Edwards and Vice President Dick Cheney.
With bold, yellow, upper-case letters against a black background, the Oct. 13 advertisement declared, "Kerry Finishes Strong, Ready to Lead." People who clicked on the banner redirected them to the DNC's debate Web page, which was frequently updated with links to the Web sites of news organizations, many of which also were declaring Kerry the debates' winner.
"The Internet is at its heart a place where people go for information, especially as they make up their minds [about who to vote for] or where to go to volunteer," said Morra Aarons, director of Internet marketing for the DNC. She directed Kerry's Internet fundraising efforts and moved to the DNC once his nomination precluded the campaign from raising further funds.
The DNC strategically placed the ads on Internet news sites where it believed debate watchers visit, within no less than 45 minutes after the conclusion of the debates. They also launched the ads in tandem with a positive news trend for Kerry, independent observers said.
"One of the things they were clever at in the immediate follow-up to the debate was trying to have more control of the message and to make sure their message got out," said Alex Treadway, director of advertising sales at National Journal Group's site, which was one of more than 50 news sites that the DNC used for advertising. "They did it supremely by using the medium."
A One-Sided Race Toward Innovation?
The DNC Web site also urged supporters to register pro-Kerry ballots in online polls, further magnifying the perception of Kerry victories. Cornfield's Web spiders also noticed the spike in Internet advertising traffic and said the additional online advertising would force him to re-evaluate the numbers in the Oct. 4 report.
"What they are doing also represents a new tactic that we have not seen this year," Cornfield said. "They are not trying to raise money or reach a certain audience; they are attempting to get people who have gone to the news pages, and they are trying to get them to come to the DNC debate page, and to try to get them to participate in post-debate spin. I do not have any response yet from the Republicans."
Other neutral observers have noticed the Bush camp's lesser role in online advertising. "Kerry really is taking the lead in the space," said Cyrus Krohn, publisher of the Microsoft-owned e-zine Slate.
In addition to its inclusion in the recent ad buy, Slate was the 11th-largest beneficiary of Kerry ads from January to mid-September, Cornfield found. The three largest Kerry sites for that period were SFGate.com, Newsweek.com and VillageVoice.com; the three largest Bush sites were KPTV.com, the Web site for Fox 12 Oregon, Parents.com and Austin, Texas, WB affiliate KVNA.com.
"It has been kind of a disappointment to see such a one-sided use of the medium," said Krohn, who added that the Bush campaign has "taken a step back" from its innovate use of a tax-cut calculator in banner ads during the 2000 presidential campaign.
Some attribute the paucity of Web advertisements to campaign strategist Matt Dowd's belief, stated at a breakfast for bloggers during the Republican National Convention, that because the Internet is not a passive medium, it is not powerful for persuasion.
Planting The Seed For 2008
Republicans have not completely ignored online advertising. In May, Bush unveiled a Web ad at Ladies' Home Journal and other women's publications. The ad took users to a Bush site that featured first lady Laura Bush talking for two-and-a-half minutes about education.
But Krohn and several Democrats criticized the length and complexity of that campaign, which has not been repeated. John Durham, president of the Pericles Communications consultancy that did the ads, said they showed that "Republicans have done a better job of using the Web as a persuasive medium." He added that Democrats have used the Web to raise money and awareness and that both sides have used e-mail effectively to motivate their bases.
Brian Reich, a Democratic-leaning blogger who runs the Boston office for Mindshare Interactive Campaigns (and an occasional commentator for National Journal's Hotline), said Republicans have an advantage on e-mail with a database of 7 million e-mails versus about 2 million for Democrats. Aarons disputes that number but refused to provide specifics.
But a Mindshare report released last week says that Kerry's campaign is doing a better job of getting its e-mails delivered, with 11 percent of its messages caught by filters that target unsolicited commercial e-mail, versus 18 percent for Bush's campaign messages. "This election could be decided by 2,000 votes, and that is probably within the difference of people who got caught in the spam filter," said Shabbir Safdar, chief technology officer for Mindshare.
Durham said that this year, Bush's use of targeted media has gone not toward the Internet but to cable television, which the campaign has used to reach targeted demographic groups like viewers of the Golf Channel. "I always thought that 2004 was not going to be big," he said. "We plant the seed for 2008, where the Internet will be very close to cable."
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