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Archive for the 'Advertising' Category

In an Interstellar Burst…

Published by William Beutler on January 19, 2008 in Advertising, Entertainment, Fred Thompson, Metapost, Technology, White House '08 and William Beutler. Closed

…I am back to save the universe. Or at least begin posting again, following just about the worst case of the flu I’ve had in years. I’ve got a few not-quite-ready-for-full-post ideas, so let’s clear them from the docket before getting back to blogging as usual:

  • First and most importantly, Blog P.I. would like to thank our advertisers. In related news, Blog P.I. has advertisers! Yes, the Blogads box at right has lain barren since I first signed up over a year ago. But now there are three — one from the left, one from the right, and one that I created to promote a friend’s website. Your support is greatly valued, even as I remain officially neutral on the merits of your particular issue and/or cause.
  • I yield to no critic in my undying devotion to HBO’s “The Wire,” but I must concur with Slate’s TV Club that this fifth and final season is off to a rocky start. The newsroom stuff is too didactic, some of the older characters are speechifying a bit, and the pacing seems weird. I know, it’s a tall order to wrap up a series of this scope in ten episodes while introducing yet another new plot strand. If this was any other TV show, I wouldn’t be complaining. But about that newsroom — does anyone else think the show’s explicit “dead where it doesn’t count” message is somewhat undercut by the ongoing investigation into the death of four girls in Southeast DC? Unlike some fictional deaths depicted this season, these real ones made the front page of the Washington Post again and again, making national (even international) news upon first discovery. I’m not discounting the trend — but current events at least prove it’s not fait accompli.
  • In a recent post, I pointed out that LinkedIn offered no option to turn off the acquaintance-recommending feature that automatically alerts you to people you may want to be networked with. As it so happened for my colleague, one such recommendation was an ex-girlfriend, whom he most certainly did not want to network with. Well, I still think LinkedIn should offer the option to disable (or enable) this feature, but he informs me that it is no longer appearing on his account. So, uh, Blog P.I. gets results?
  • Here’s something totally useless, but as an admirer of Douglas Hofstader, amuses me greatly: What’s the TinyURL for TinyURL.com? Well, if you plug the URL into its self-same website, it turns out to be:

         http://tinyurl.com/u

    So what’s the TinyURL for that?

         http://tinyurl.com/7uw

    And that?

         http://tinyurl.com/8ee

    I could go on, but I’ll spare you. The website remembers every TinyURL generated for each page previously entered, so I assume that http://tinyurl.com was in fact the 21st URL entered into the website. Nice to know others are just as interested in the concept of reflexivity. (Hat tip: NM3.)

  • Today is a day I’ve been counting down to for nearly a year, even though I didn’t always know it: Fred Thompson needs a big showing in South Carolina’s primary this evening, and via Captain Ed, it looks like he just might get it. It’s been a great last few weeks for the campaign, maybe even the best few weeks of the campaign so far. Here’s hoping it’s not, in fact, the last few weeks of the campaign. I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

I guess that’s all for the moment. Regular blogging about matters of politics and technology to resume shortly.

Josh Marshall’s Readers Are… Not So Bright

Published by William Beutler on January 2, 2008 in Advertising, Campaigns, Fred Thompson, Iowa Caucuses, Mitt Romney, Seriously, Television, White House '08 and William Beutler. 7 Comments

This end of a post at Talking Points Memo today made me laugh:

If Romney loses Iowa after having spent $1.8 billion there and then loses in his backyard in New Hampshire he’ll be in bad, bad shape. The horrid press over the following few weeks would likely kill him.

(ed.note: I had meant the reference to Mitt’s $1.8 billion in spending in Iowa to be an obvious bit of sarcasm at Romney’s expense. But it seems Romney’s efforts to buy the Republican nomination have become so notorious and proverbial that many readers are asking if it’s really true. So, no, I believe his spending is well below $1.8 billion. But he wants it really bad and there’s still a day left. So who knows.)

$1.8 billion sounds plausible? Using what counting system?

Elsewhere on the web today, a Des Moines-based WFAA reporter says Romney has spent $4 million on TV ads; also today, Fred Thompson [disclosure] aide Rich Galen writes in a column for CNS news,

according to the Professional Guessing Class, [Romney] may have spent upwards of $8 MILLION here

If Romney has in fact spent $8 million, which doesn’t sound like a bad guess, then he would have to spend 225 times that in order to spend $1.8 billion. CNN says all the candidates combined have spent $40 million on TV ads; I’d be surprised if there was a billion dollars worth of TV time to be had in Iowa in an entire year.

If Romney really dropped that much money in the state, Iowa could practically retire, and hey, maybe accede to another state or system its coveted first-in-the-nation status. Which would probably be a good thing for everyone. Except, of course, Iowa.

P.S. For example, see this from First Read:

MOUNT PLEASANT, Iowa — A woman who famously switched from volunteering for Clinton to Obama has changed her mind… again. …

“Probably I’ll caucus for Richardson,” she said after Edwards spoke. “My guess is he won’t be viable, and then I’ll probably scoot right over to Edwards.”

Are Iowans really so serious about their vote? Or are they spoiled and self-indulgent? In another state, I’ll bet voters would not feel so entitled, political observers would not ascribe such mythical status to their choices, and just maybe, subsequent states would have a bigger say in the primary process.

Alas, as my former Hotline colleague Reid Wilson explains, attempts at reform might be about as easy to properly implement as the Fair Tax.

P.S. After some consideration, I actually wish I had called this “Josh Marshall’s Readers Are… Not So Good With Numbers.”

All Political Consultants are Stupid

Published by Not Paul Begala on May 16, 2007 in Advertising, Brick-and-mortar consultants, Meatspace, Netroots and Television. 1 Comment

Except the ones that want your business!

The firm of MacWilliams Kirchner Sanders has a three-part series at MyDD this week (here, here and here, in reverse order) on media buying.

My summation: Buying broadcast is bad and nasty political consultants do it to rip your ass off because they charge commissions. Hire us, because we’re smarter, and it’s for a good cause, because our clients are progressives — not corporations!

Forgive my snark, but everytime I hear this “broadcast sucks, buy cable, and media consultants are all whores sucking away your money” it makes me laugh. These guys make great points about efficiency and targeting but they don’t tell the full story.

First, you can make assumptions that men watch certain channels and women others, but you’ll need to get real data from the individual markets through your own polling — not exactly cheap to do. Registered, likely and unregistered voters do not neatly fit into demographic profiles that cable companies have on hand.

Second, frequency and points matter. MKS at least recognizes that fact in this graf:

It is important to point out that campaigns can’t always spot buy. Some cable systems limit spot buying for political campaigns or don’t allow them at all. (When that happens, the buyers have to push back and negotiate hard for whatever they can get. Most of the time it works.)

Yeah, no shit guys. Campaigns can almost never spot buy on cable because cable operators sell hundreds upon hundreds of spots over a boatload of channels. They like predictability, something campaigns are not. Plus, you don’t really get to bully them like you can with broadcast. Your $100K over two months doesn’t mean squat to them.

Broadcast has many more people buying for a fewer number of spots. And, they also happen to have the local news stations, something voters tend to watch.

The real problem with cable is that you cannot build GRP’s (Gross Ratings Points) quickly like you can on broadcast. You can buy as much cable as possible over months and not build points as quickly as you can on broadcast. This creates a problem: time. Because you need to build frequency, cable requires you to buy long term, sometimes a full month to reach appropriate saturation. This means you can’t pivot your commercials to answer new charges, you limit your spot options because of the length of the campaign and you cannot air new charges/mistakes that happen late in the campaign.

Broadcast allows these options because you can buy up the things that people watch and get your GRPs up in as little as 5 days. Of course, that’s more expensive.

It annoys the piss out of me that the netroots frequently assigns we political consultants the “dumbass” label because we don’t do things the way they see fit. As if we don’t want to win, save money or be effective.

It’s even more interesting to now see political consultants start playing the same game. Why? Guess they’re trying out a new marketing strategy to get more clients.

Update: This proves my point exactly. They give you an example of their work. This was an interest group campaign that used targeted cable to increase turnout among infrequent, pro-choice women voters in Oregon. To be fair, they don’t claim cable was the answer, but the example falls right into my main complaint about cable. This was a long-term, sustained campaign that relied on 1 message and 1 group of voters. It was likely prudent to layer in cable with mail, phones and all else to get the message out to women who cared about choice. But, if they had to switch up their message in the last 2 weeks, they would never have been able to build enough repetition behind it to get out their new message. Convenient for interest groups, not so convenient for tight campaigns where a sliver of the electorate that decides in the final weeks of the campaign determines your winner.

Plus, by citing “nearly 70% — 24,523 — of the 35,000 women targeted by PPAF in those three cable clusters turned out to vote in 2004″ is very disingenuous. There just so happened to be a presidential election that cycle where the incumbent was widely despised by the left (pro-choice voters tend to be more liberal) and you had 2 women at the top of the ticket, Christine Gregoire and Patty Murray. Both, I’ll bet, targeted the hell out of pro-choice women because their Republican opponents (especially George Nethercutt) were bad on choice.

Again, there’s no doubt that cable had an effect, but the netroots wholesale advocacy for cable just doesn’t jive with how real campaigns are run.

The Benchmark Poll: Leif Larson

Published by William Beutler on April 10, 2007 in Advertising, Brick-and-mortar consultants, Republicans and The Benchmark Poll. 3 Comments
Benchmark Poll Logo (small)

Previous Editions
Margie Omero (D)
Jordan Gehrke (R)
Ezra Reese (D)

Leif Larson is a senior vice president at Jamestown Associates, a national political consulting firm, where he advises clients on strategy and oversees print, television and radio production as well as media placement. Past and present clients include Reps. Patrick McHenry, John McHugh, Mary Bono, John Campbell, John Shimkus, College Republicans and the NRCC. His work has been recognized by his peers, earning him a national Pollie award from the American Association of Political Consultants. He graduated from The George Washington University with a BA in Political Science and resides in Alexandria with his wife Janine and their 1 year old son, Angus. He’s also the subject of our latest Benchmark Poll:

How do your parents’ politics compare to your own?

My Dad is very economically conservative and my Mom is very much a social conservative. My Grandmother was very much like P.J. O’Rourke’s in that she was so conservative she wouldn’t even say the word “Democrat” — she just refereed to them as “those bastards.”

Did you run for class office in high school or college? Did you win?

No, I never ran for office while in school. I did support a candidate in college who ran on the platform that if elected student body president he would abolish the student government.

When you first moved to the District, what food did you miss most from home?

In-and-Out Burger! Best burgers in the world. A Double-Double “Animal Style” with fresh fries and a large lemonade….ahhhhhh.

Once you were here, did you work any non-political jobs did you work to get by?

I came out with some money saved up from working some campaigns so I didn’t have to but I had some applications for bartending. Some days I wonder if I wouldn’t have been happier bartending. The guys at Sequoia make a killing!

What’s your favorite bar in DC? Favorite outside the Beltway?

Well this is a little “Old Skool” not sure how many people will remember the “Crow Bar”. What a great place. Depends how far outside the Beltway. I enjoy the Clarendon Ballroom scene but the BEST bar ever was in Santa Barbara, California Jimmy’s Oriental Garden.

Whether in a campaign or in government, you’ve surely had to work with someone who drove you crazy. What were they like?

A former boss of mine. Smart, knowledgeable and good at what he does but he used to have a temper. You never knew if he was going to laugh or freak out on you. I remember him telling a campaign worker, “I’ll see you working in a Tijuana whorehouse before you work in politics again.”

If you had your own blog, what would you call it and what would you write about?

If It Ain’t Scottish It’s CRAP! All things Scottish and Republican Politics.

So, who do you know? That is — who is most responsible for you being where you are in politics now?

Two college professors, Dr. Peter Haslund and Dr. Manoutchehr Eskandari-Qajar.

If you could be or any politician, past or present, for one day and one event, who and what event?

This is a tough one. Winston Churchill was such a statesman and warrior but I would have to go with our own T.R., Teddy Roosevelt the 26th President.

To be him making the decisions to build the Panama Canal and position the United States as one of the worlds super powers would be great.

Where do you see yourself in five years?

Doing what I am doing now but on a beach in California… if my wife will let me!

The Google Primary II: Buy Your Rivals

Published by William Beutler on April 9, 2007 in Advertising, Barack Obama, Google, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, John McCain, Mitt Romney, Online Campaigns, Rudy Giuliani and White House '08. 9 Comments

Yesterday I managed to get a whole post out of the observation that most, but not all, of the top tier candidates are buying up their own names on Google AdWords. In this post, I’ll try to get some mileage out of reporting something more interesting:

The candidates who are bidding for their own names on Google’s advertising program are also bidding on their opponents’ names.

To take one example, when you search for Mitt Romney on Google, one of the ads you’ll see in the AdWords column along the right-hand side will be for John McCain. So I ran searches for Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards, Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani and John McCain, and then I compared the results. If the image below hurts your eyes to read, right-click on the image and open a larger version into another browser tab. Here’s what I found, in the order listed:

2008 presidential candidates on Google AdWords

When you run these searches, slightly different ads come up each time. It’s probably in Google’s interest to mix it up some, not to mention a number of advertisers may be bidding the same amount on some of these phrases. Therefore, the image above is only meant to give a general idea of what ads will appear. For example, since I Photoshopped that together last night, I’ve now seen a Giuliani ad appear in a Romney search. It isn’t reflected above, but it has been factored into this post.

Okay, but who all bought who? Here’s whose name/keyword was bought by whom — keyword, then campaigns:

Clinton
Obama
Giuliani		 Romney
McCain
Giuliani		 Giuliani
McCain		 McCain
Romney
Giuliani

If you’d rather see who bought whose name as a keyword, try this on for size — campaign, then keywords:

Obama
Clinton		 Romney
McCain
Giuliani 		Giuliani
Hillary

McCain
Romney		 McCain
Giuliani

You can probably do all the same armchair analysis here that I can. Obama’s camp believes he can win over Hillary Clinton people (supporters, or those interested enough to Google her name), Romney’s team hopes to win over McCain people, McCain aims to pull support from both his GOP rivals, and the Giuliani squad is on a comparative buying spree, to the point of wooing some Hillary supporters. For some reason, nobody is bidding on either Edwards or Obama.

Meanwhile, in a post seemingly anticipating this one, Oregon Dem consultant Kari Chisholm observed:

The point of a Google ad isn’t to find people who know they’re looking for you — they should be able to find you just fine. It’s to find people who are looking for something else; and your candidate is the answer to their question. This will work even better for the second-tier candidates who aren’t getting much media attention.

I didn’t find any second-tier candidates bidding on the top-tier names, but he’s right: They should be. I also didn’t venture any further than the top six candidates as generally agreed upon by looking at polls, fundraising and what how the Washington Post/New York Times axis treats the various contenders. Another mini-study such as this might turn up some interesting results for other candidates, and other phrases that on which campaigns have bid.

Additionally, election campaigns are not the only customers bidding for higher-placed ads on Google AdWords — they are joined by various for- and not for-profit enterprises, who seek to associate their products and programs with the candidates listed. Here’s what I found, based on the screen caps taken on Saturday night:

  • YouTube — that is, Google — bought everybody. They also bid the most. Hmmm.
  • The Pew Forum, not (yet) owned by Google, was the only other website/organization to bid, and bid high on the words.
  • The Center for American Progress’ Campus Progress bought Obama, and Obama only.
  • Something called Ascend Alliance — which appears to be a student exchange program without the students — has bought Romney, but no one else.
  • The do-gooders do seem to like Romney: the One campaign claims “Romney wears ONE band.” The ONE blog provides evidence, although it could simply be that he held one in his hand.
  • Human Events bought Giuliani and more curiously, Obama as well.
  • Cringe-inducing pro-voting groups have attached themselves to Edwards (generationengage.org), Rudy (declareyourself.org) and Romney (megadittoes).
  • Moviefone and Tickets-for-Events.com are both betting that people mistake John Edwards for John Edward of “Crossing Over” fame (or “fame”).
  • Hillary, Obama, Edwards and Romney all have obviously for-profit concerns bidding on their words — selling buttons and T-shirts, mostly — perhaps saying less about how well they think those candidates will sell than about how the others will not. The market has spoken — and Republicans aren’t moving units so well these days.
  • Hillary, Obama and Romney are all popular enough as keywords that a link at the bottom of their columns will take you to more ads, if you wish.
  • Trouble for Romney: one of the websites bidding on his name is ConservativesAgainstRomney.com. Lucky for Giuliani, sister site ConservativesAgainstRudy.com does not appear to be bidding on his name.
  • On the other hand, the Conservative Book Club appears to have bid on Romney and Romney only, so he should be reassured that not all conservatives are against him.

Anything I missed? Let me know in the comments.

Update: Credit where it’s due: Jeff Jarvis had this idea last week, although we went about it in different ways. Meanwhile, Kate Kaye at the ClickZ News Blog decided to see which candidates had bid on certain issue-related keywords:

iraq war, troop surge, social security, poverty, global warming, climate change, new hampshire, homeland security, terrorism, immigration, us attorneys, alberto gonzales, iran, iran nuclear, nuclear weapons, china trade, trade deficit, wmd, afghanistan, pelosi syria, british sailors, retirement, gay rights, women rights, feminism, labor rights, minimum wage, living wage, abortion, pro life, roe v wade, draft, military draft

So who bought those key words? Apparently none of them.

The Google Primary I: Paying, Or Not Playing

Published by William Beutler on April 8, 2007 in Advertising, Barack Obama, Google, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, John McCain, Mitt Romney, Online Campaigns, Rudy Giuliani, Second Life and White House '08. 4 Comments

Considering that Google controls just about half of the market for search in the U.S., that Google estimates its advertising network reaches 80% of U.S. Internet users, and that their program is extremely flexible, any political campaign should think strongly about using them. And even though pay-per-click ads are not without risk, this should be all the more true for a presidential campaign.

I’m working on a longer post looking at the 2008 candidates’ use of Google AdWords, but in the meantime, let’s first see who is playing and how they’re playing. Counting only the top six contenders from both parties, here’s what each campaign wants you to see at the top of a Google search results when you search for their name:

Giuliani's Google Sponsored Link

John McCain's Google Sponsored Link

Mitt Romney's Google Sponsored Link

Hillary Clinton's Google Sponsored Link

Barack Obama's Google Sponsored Link

John Edwards' Google Sponsored Link

Hillary has incorporated Blogads into her online strategy and Edwards has been running an online campaign since early 2005, yet neither have bothered to make sure their campaign sites are the top result on Google. (Of course, Google News results do appear beneath the Sponsored Links for the others, but I have cropped them out.) Although Democrats have rushed into Second Life and other brave new worlds, apparently two of their top contenders are ignoring plain old Google.

A few other findings, based on tedious reloading of the same searches, over and over:

  • Obama is indeed playing, but he’s not all in. His ad displays less than half the time — so if you don’t see it, hit reload.
  • For all three Republicans, their Sponsored Link appears almost every time, but not quite.
  • McCain has three different versions of his ad in rotation. Key phrases: “Learn More” and “Sign Up.”
  • Romney also has three versions rotating. Key phrases: “Build a New American Dream” and “Strong. New. Leadership.”
  • Giuliani has just the one pictured above.

More later. Stay tuned.