There's a pretty good chance that you've already seen evidence elsewhere of the fact that Google is rather thrilled with how aggressively Scott Brown's campaign embraced the suite of Google tools in his win. Google reps are reporting that the campaign dropped $145,000 on a "network blast" that saturated the Internet with Brown ads in the final days of the campaign, and all told the campaign spent some $230,000 on YouTube ads and overlays, visual ads, and in-search advertising. The result? Brown's ads were put in front of the faces of Massachusetts residents 65 million times in the months leading up to the election. A Google rep praised Brown's online ad effort as "very slick, very targeted, and very strategic."

But something else has Google reps particularly chuffed: how much the Brown campaign, they say, relied upon Google's full suite of tools, including their free online collaborative apps. Brown's new media director Robert Willington tweeted, for example, "Where would our #masen campaign be without google docs? scary thought." The Brown campaign, said the company, relied upon Gmail Chat to communicate. And then, says Google, there was their election-day voter protection hotline, run through -- you guessed it -- Google Voice.

On the Coakley online front, two sources with knowledge of the new media aspect of her campaign report that Coakley's side -- thinking that it had the race sewn up -- didn't invest in a Google Ad strategy until new media strategists from Organizing for America got involved in the race, after it started to become clear that Coakley was going to have to put up a real fight to win the seat.

ClickZ's Kate Kaye has a look at the Massachusetts Republican's online operation, with some good details on online ad strategy and insights from the campaign's new media staff and consultants:

Today the campaign needs that national online support to transform into local, get-out-the-vote volunteers willing to knock on doors and make phone calls. On Thursday, the campaign launched a highly targeted display ad effort aimed at people living within 30 miles of its 10 regional field offices across the state. The ads, delivered using the "Google network blast" or "surge" tactic, include messages specific to each region; ads targeted to people living near Plymouth, Massachusetts, encourage supporters to "Volunteer in Plymouth."

"We have targeted towns that we want to win," said Rob Willington, Brown's online campaign strategist and executive director of RebuildTheParty.com, the organization formed after the '08 elections to educate Republicans about digital campaign tools and techniques.

"When you need to conserve funds, targeting becomes extremely important," said Mindy Finn, partner at Engage, a Washington, D.C.-based digital consultancy that serves right-leaning campaigns. The company is handling Brown's online fundraising effort, which has attracted headlines for its success.

The full thing is here.

(With Nick Judd)

When it finally came time to tallying the votes late Tuesday night, New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg's victory over Democratic challenger and city comptroller Bill Thompson turned out to be remarkably narrow -- and surprisingly so, in part because of the gap the size of the Hudson between what the candidates spent on this race, some $81 million from Bloomberg's pocket to the $6.6 million Thompson dropped according to recent filings. What's particularly interesting for us here is how that difference in spending played out not only offline, but online as well.

PaidContent's Joseph Tartakoff reports that once and future Mayor Bloomberg poured some $2.1 million into online advertising though late October. And those records thus don't include Bloomberg's burst of web ads during the last week of the campaign, a blitz that made him nearly ubiquitous for online New Yorkers. A Google rep described that network-wide spending burst as "massive."

Indeed, spending records from the New York City Campaign Finance Board show that Bloomberg handed over more than two million dollars to Connections Media under the category of "Internet ads." Do the math, and it turns out that out of the whopping $145 that Bloomberg spent to pull each of his voters into the polls on Tuesday, just about $3.75 per voter went to buying Google ads and other online advertising. The DC-based Connections Media is headed up by web veteran Jonah Seiger.

Thompson, on the other hand, spent about $13 per voter, in his 46% to 50.6% defeat at the hands of Bloomberg, and while Thompson's spending records don't break down online advertising costs as cleanly as Bloomberg's do, the underdog Democrat laid out just $205,000 in consulting fees to the Obama-affiliated firm Blue State Digital. The one spending burst identified as going directly towards online ads came at the end of August, and rang in at just $10,000.

Both candidates, though, spent multiples more on television advertising than they did on online ad spots. Here too, getting Thompson's buying power anywhere in the neighborhood of Bloomberg's would require shifting the decimal point. Bloomberg handed over $29.5 million to the DC firm Squier Knapp Dunn, and Thompson spent $1.7 million in TV ads, directed to the Philadelphia and California admakers The Campaign Group.

When all is said and done, the number reflect just out outmatched financially Thompson was in his competition with Bloomberg, online and off. Thompson, for example, spent just slightly more on the web gurus Blue State Digital as Bloomberg paid in postage.

Oh, those time-honored traditions of democracy. Spreading leaflets door-to-door. Holding up signs at busy intersections. And, at least in recent elections, the Google network blast. Two candidates whose chances for victory tomorrow range from pretty likely to go-ahead-and-bet-the-rent-money-on-it are taking no chances, employing the somewhat cutting-edge Google network blast technique to blanket the Internet experience of potential voters in their regions with advertisements touting their bona fides.

A Google rep confirms that those of you reading from the Virginia area or New York City might have already noticed. Virginia's Republican nominee for governor Bob McDonnell and New York City mayoral candidate Mike Bloomberg are both running Google blasts, where their geo-targeted ads pop up on blogs, other websites, and Gmail. As will come as no surprise to anyone who has followed Mayor Mike's path to re-election, the Google rep describes Bloomberg's Google Ad buy as "massive."

For McDonnell's part, new media advisor Mindy Finn confirms that a Google Ad blast is running on behalf of the candidate today, targeted at both voters spending the day in Virginia and those many Virginians who spend their days working in DC. McDonnell's Google Ad buy started up at 9am, and will run through 5pm. McDonnell's buy seems to be partial to tech-focused sites. That's not the craziest approach given Virginia's vibrant tech industry and venture capitalist community. (Added bonus: putting the ad blast in the face of all those tech writers who are well positioned to write about the technique.) McDonnell, it seems, is popping up on Android blogs, and Google passes along a screen cap of how McDonnell is showing his face on that mecca of all tech business geekery known as TechCrunch.

How much does all this ammunition cost? Google, for one, is mum about what sort of appropriation of campaign funds it takes to unleash such overwhelming force.

There's a messy battle brewing down in Florida over whether Facebook and Google ads should have to carry political disclaimers. Because of space constraints, those online ads are exempted from disclosure requirements under federal election law but not state statute in Florida. That's interesting on the substance, but also for what appears anecdotally to be the growing eagerness of new media political consultants to use opposition to their techniques as a selling point for their services. ClickZ's Kate Kaye has more.

The House Judiciary subcommittee with jurisdiction over Internet practices held a hearing this week that -- if Congress' history is any guide to its future -- may well mark the start of congressional handwringing over how companies like Google and others are using geo-targeting, search histories, and other markers to serve up customized advertisements. Critics (and some advocates) call it "behavioral advertising."

And Congress' interest is particularly relevant for us here because targeting Google advertisements based on what you're searching for, the websites you visit, and where you're surfing from is quickly becoming a standard political online practice. We saw it most recently with the battle over the Employee Free Choice Act, detailed here. It's a tool in the toolbox of nearly all online campaigners these days.

Virginia Democrat Rick Boucher is the chair of the House Subcommittee on Communications, Technology and the Internet. This week, he called together a session to examine what's known as deep packet inspection (DPI), which is peeking into the contents of the chunks of information that flow across the Internet so that decisions can be made about how to route them or, in some cases, about how to customize the end users Internet experience based on what they do online and how they do it. Taking a look at the envelopes that Internet data travels in is widely accepted practice. Steaming them open to see what's inside isn't -- yet.

That's why Boucher called the hearing, to examine whether legislation is needing to stave off DPI misuses of DPI before they come into widespread use. He called that prospect "nothing short of frightening."

But it's Round Two of the Boucher hearings that should perk the ears of online practitioners. At this week's hearing, Boucher announced his intention to hold a follow-up session this summer, in collaboration with the House Energy's Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection, that will focus on the privacy risks raised by behavioral advertising. Google and other online advertising companies are expected to be invited to attend. Boucher is no Internet naive, but the current fuzziness surrounding behavioral ads seem to make him uneasy. As he said at the hearing, "a range of concerns related to online advertising should be vetted."

Boucher's promised that the result of the series of hearing will be legislation aimed at "extending to Internet users [the] assurance that their online experience is more secure." In the name of self interest, if your business or your campaign makes use of targeted online ads, this is one congressional thread worth following.

(Photo of Rick Boucher by joebeone)

We've been keeping tabs on how both proponents and opponents of the Employee Free Choice Act are making use of Google ads to attempt to win hearts and minds (and, not incidentally, email addresses) during this high-stakes legislative battle. Not to be outdone by their union brethren over at SEIU, the AFL-CIO web shop talking up a below-the-radar (until now!) tactic aimed at a miniscule audience: the district offices of some enormously important Senate votes. Google ads now has a location targeting option, allowing advertisers to either drop a pin on a map or type in an address, and then set a radius within which their ads runs. (Google doesn't set a minimum circle of influence, but suggests drilling in no closer than 20 miles.) Ground zero in this case? The local offices of Maine Republicans Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins. Without the backing of Republicans like Snowe and Collins, EFCA has about much of a chance at passing through the Senate as Maine does at passing through a winter without snow. Both, though, have come out against the bill because of what it does to "secret elections." The Maine senators have offices sprinkled throughout the state in places like Bangor, Augusta, and Portland, and the AFL is targeting them with ads making the case that "78% of Americans support workers' freedom to form unions and bargain for a better life." Call it ambient advertising, Senate edition.

We noted yesterday that the forces assembled around the Employee Free Choice Act now being battled over in Washington are making use of Google ads linked to obvious search terms like "EFCA." But things get even more interesting when you drill down a bit. Union folks are grumbling that they're being outgunned on the Google ad front by anti-EFCA groups like the Workforce Fairness Institute and the Labor Relations Institute. Indeed, a Google search for the bill acronym returns ads against it at a rate of four-to-one. But when it comes to EFCA inside baseball, the playing field shifts a bit. Google up the name "Lanny Davis." He's the former Clinton administration official who has been pushing a "compromise" measure (in brief, no card check but tougher organizing protections) backed by the CEOs of Starbucks, Whole Foods and Costco. Up pops nary an anti-EFCA ad. But it does return one reading "Don't be fooled by Lanny," which directs to a Talking Points Memo post panning the Davis alternative. The way Google ads work, it's impossible to know for sure who's paying for an ad. But just a few dollars is gaining someone the right to shape this one small corner of the debate.

(Reposted from Click Z)

Yesterday's closely-watched special congressional election in New York's 20th District prompted the use of a rarely-employed online ad tactic some liken to carpet bombing. Call it the "Google Surge" or the "Google Network Blast," the ad tactic has piqued the interest of old-school political media consultants typically reluctant to consider using Internet ads for anything other than fundraising or building supporter lists.

• A recent Congressional Research Service Report confirmed that what we know for absolute certain about the new federal CTO job doesn't amount to all that much. But Christopher J. Dorobek has some intriguing new reporting that shines much light on the situation. What we've been talking about as the CTO post, writes Dorobek, actually breaks down into two jobs...
• "It's not the Democratic party anymore," says one "highly placed" Democrat. "It's the Obama party." That's one of the more striking bits of Lisa Taddeo's new Esquire profile of Obama campaign manager David Plouffe...
• National Journal's David Herbert makes the case that what's limiting federal agencies' online impact isn't so much the Paperwork Reduction Act and other regulations as it is the challenges of connecting to an audience...
• There's some chatter starting to happen around the idea that the some $9 billion or so in broadband money in the stimulus package is a bad bet...
• And more.