Campaign 2008 - we ain't seen nothing yet?

As the Obama and McCain campaigns make their final 7 day push to election day we'll see more ads and get out the vote effort than at any other time in history, especially for Obama (who has far more money), and especially in the key states of Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.

Obama's get out the vote system is likely to go down in history as the most sophisticated ever. In Florida over 100,000 volunteers have been mobilized to help with the Obama campaign, and CNN reports that poll workers will scan names of those who voted into a system that will then make decisions about where to run targeted pre-recorded TV appeals by Obama to get out and vote. This is a brilliant tactic as failing to mobilize enough voters was a key reason for the Gore loss in 2000 and Kerry loss in 2004.

Obama: 1 Million on Google in February!

Daya over at WebGuild is tallying up the Google advertisnig campaign spends, noting that Obama spent a whopping one million on Google advertising in February vs Clinton's 67,000.

Analysts generally credit Obama with a brilliant use of online social networking and resources.

Donny Deutsch on Christmas Ads

Advertising expert Donny Deutsch was hard on most of the Christmas campaign advertising, suggesting much of it is a waste of time or not really "on message" for the candidates.

I agreed with some of Deutsch's analyses but disagreed with his criticism of the Obama ad, which I'd argue is simply brilliant. Giuliani ridiculously offers off camera people fruitcakes and sits beside a fake santa. Edwards simply offers a short campaign pitch. Clinton is wrapping presents like "National Pre-K" and "Health Care". Not terrible, but smells insincere which is a key Clinton challenge.

The two "stand out" ads are that of Huckabee, which somewhat spookily features a shelf filmed to look like a cross behind the candidate - almost as if they are sending a secret signal to the minions waiting in the wings for a messianic candidate. Deutsch stopped just short of calling this ad out as a dangerous sign of trends in American politics, but indicated he was alarmed by this type of symbolism.

The great ad is Obama's. His picture perfect family sits beside a tree as Michelle wishes everybody well. Obama then suggests it's time to come together rather than apart, and his family almost frames this concept in a greeting card way with the daughters wishing us all happy holidays. Schmalzy? Maybe, but this ad is a brilliant example of reaching the people you want in the way they want to be reached. Obama needs women to vote for him, not Hilary. This is a huge challenge that his campaign is meeting masterfully with Oprah and ads like this.

Online Advertising in Presidential campaigns is trivial

Here's a great summary of online ad spending by the presidential candidates except for the fact that it does not note how trivial thee levels of exposure is even for McCain who ran the most impressions.

Clinton, with under a million impressions, is spending perhaps a ten thousand total.
This low spend indicates that the online marketing people are very challenged with this new media. A spend of million dollars online would saturate the online world with the message because you don't need much targeting for a prez campaign.

Maybe they are holding back for strategic reasons but I'm guessing that they just don't get it. Big firms continue to dominate the "thinking" about how to run online campaigns, and big firms consistently have their clients waste money on foolish and stylish high CPM image based advertising rather than dramtically cheaper and more strategic pay per click and cheap image campaigns. There is a huge amount of inventory available online for massive branding campaigns like a candidate needs.

Unlike other products where you need a lot of targeting, a candidate for national office generally wants to talk to *everybody*. Even kids can have an indirect impact on election politics.

Given the jaw dropping sums about to be spent, I think we'll see the smart candidates work a lot more with online though agency ignorance of online marketing strategy may prevail in this realm.