The Daily Background

Here’s a question that’s been on my mind lately. How much is the Obama campaign spending (wasting?) on online advertisements?

Think about it- they’re practically everywhere. And full-flash ads of the type they use don’t come cheap. Whether via Google Adsense (they’re often on this site for instance), or via mainstream media site’s in-house advertising programs, Obama 08 ads are nearly ubiquitous online. They’re on the front page of the New York Times website, CNN, etc. It seems as though you can’t go anywhere without seeing one (or two) of them on a page.

What are the advantages to online advertising versus traditional advertising (lawn signs, billboards, radio spots, etc) when it comes to campaigns? I can think of one major one right off the bat. If you see a lawn sign, a billboard, a radio spot, or a television commercial for a candidate, they all have to fit a lot of effectiveness into only a little bit of the medium. Is a billboard really going to convince somebody to vote for a candidate? How about a lawn-sign? A 30-second radio spot?

But with online ads, a person can easily click on the advertisement, which can take them to another site where they can find (in theory) as much information as their heart desires. So in that way, there’s a big advantage to the medium. But there’s also a much smaller demographic– with a well-placed billboard, you might get tens of thousands of views a day, and you’re libel to get everybody from a homeless person on the side of the road to a millionaire being chauffeured around in their limousine to glance at it. With online ads, you’re targeting a much less diverse audience, which can be both good and bad, depending on what types of sites you choose to advertise on. Heck, you can even serve up ads that are catered to a specific geographic audience these days. Or ads that display in certain languages, depending on what language a website is in.

So, is it a waste of money, or are they seeing significant returns on it, at least in terms of traffic, and perhaps donations that can be linked to the ads (i.e. somebody clicks through the ad, reads some informational material, then clicks through to a donations page)? There’s no way for anybody outside the Obama web team to know– and they may not even know whether it was worth it themselves until this whole thing is over with. But I’d love for some enterprising reporters (bloggers?) to dig into the next quarter’s FEC reports to see what kind of information can be found about online expenditures for the candidates.

Filed under: Z-TDB Blog