As more and more candidates declare their intention to run for president in 2008, more and more Americans will turn to search engines like Google and Yahoo! to find their websites.

So, at a minimum, I expected all 17 of the presumed candidates to have purchased keywords. To my chagrin, only six candidates have taken the plunge. And if you take a closer look, it’s the Republicans who are doing a significantly better job of using search to communicate with the electorate...

MediaPost reported last November that online political ad spending hit $40 million according to PQ Media. And then today, The Wall Street Journal pointed to PQ Media in reporting that candidates, political parties and third-party groups will spend $80 million in online ads during the 2008 cycle.

The problem is, PQ Media’s numbers don’t gel with conventional wisdom and competitor data. Interviews with campaign strategists, estimates from TNS Media Intelligence/CMAG (download presentation), data from Nielsen’s AdRelevance (download description), and my personal knowledge as an online political advertising consultant peg online political advertising in 2006 at no more than $5 million...

The Web on the Candidates

TechPresident blogger David All has started a new blog, TechRepublican.com (nice name David!) that wants to get the Republican establishment to embrace Web 2.0 strategies. "While the Internet has grown rapidly, the Party apparatus and its top officials are operating in a disconnected, Web 0.5 world. The result is that our message is failing to penetrate the modern world where millions of independent voters and modern Republicans spend a majority of their time," All writes. All and friends want to galvanize "Gen Nexters" (ooh, that term hurts) to "think, discuss, read, collaborate, criticize, share, and act to make a difference" in the Republican Party, and to usher the party into the 21st century. It's big project that will benefit from David's bottomless well of energy. We wish him luck. Also check out DomeNation, a weekly show on YouTube with David and Jerome Armstrong which will focus on politics and technology.

Following up on his analysis of who's buying Google text ads for Democratic candidates, Steve Patterson of the Bivings Report takes a look at who's buying ads for the Republicans. In addition to gear from Zazzle.com, several of the candidates are buying ads under others' names. For example, Rudy Giuliani is buying ads for searches for himself, Sam Brownback, Mike Huckabee, and John McCain, and only Giuliani and McCain are taking out ads against their own sites.

At last week's New Organizing Institute/IPDI-sponsored Google presentation on advocacy tools, after looking at Google Ads and answering questions about click fraud, the company's Elections and Issue Advocacy team touched on a new tool whose potential political significance jumped out at me. More than a year ago, Google snapped up a company that was developing an online interface for buying radio advertising, and despite some skepticism about its usefulness, the product looks to be moving out of beta fairly soon.

You can get a good overview of how the ordering system will work here; note that you can specify stations by location and genre, set your own budget, choose your time of day to run ads and get some reporting after-the-fact. You upload your own ads as mp3s, though the site will help you find a company to build them if necessary. Groovy! Basically, you can run ads across the country from a single interface — you won't need to work with different ad reps for individual stations or chains of stations. With 1600 AM and FM stations in the network, and the top 10 stations in 24 of the 25 biggest media markets in the country, Google claims the potential to reach essentially 100% of the U.S. population.

Managing placements of online ads can be a challenge, as the Obama campaign recently learned. With more caucuses and primaries approaching, his campaign accidentally placed an ad for Nevada on a South Carolina TV news website. This seems to be an isolated incident. Fortunately, online ads can be swapped or pulled in ways that print ads cannot. The ad is no longer displayed on the News 14 website.

The big news in this campaign cycle is that online ads by the campaigns are expected to hit $20 million. Woo hoo. That is a lot of money, isn't it? Well, actually, it is not.

Obama won big in this month's North Carolina primary and his online ad strategy in April may have played a role in driving his supporters to the polls. As the primaries chug along, Senator Barack Obama has steamrolled past fellow Democratic Presidential hopeful Senator Hillary Clinton and likely Republican nominee John McCain in the Web ad department.

Video war continues between Obama and McCain, McCain is using Wikipedia, David All is impressed with McCain's online ads, Jame Hamsher has a new PAC to boast about, #dontgo campaign gets a little more support,

Barack Obama, The Democratic National Committee and "Car Wash Babes"? They may not seem a likely grouping, but yesterday, ads paid for by the Democratic National Committee and the Illinois Senator's presidential campaign showed up on an array of local Clear Channel rock radio station Web sites featuring content some would consider inappropriate for a radio station, much less a presidential campaign.

(Crossposted from ClickZ)

If a recent online political ad revenue prediction is correct, President-elect Barack Obama's campaign could account for at least half of all 2008 online political ad spending. The winning candidate's campaign shelled out nearly $8 million through October to Google, Yahoo, Facebook, news Web sites, ad networks, and in-game ad firm Massive.

Google remains the clear winner of Obama's Web spoils, though the search giant's payments for October have yet to appear in the campaign's Federal Election Commission filings. The company collected $3.5 million from Obama for America, according to the latest FEC reports analyzed by ClickZ News. Keeping with a trend established early this year, Yahoo remains a distant second, having garnered around $673,000 from the campaign. A total of $7.97 million was spent on Web ads in '08 through October by the campaign, according to FEC reports.