PardonMyFrench

Are You Still Not Using Google's Ad Planner?

I've been directing online advertising campaigns since the mid 90s for very large companies (AT&T, DLJ/Harrisdirect) as well as small companies and political campaigns (ex - John McCain for President). When I've worked for big companies I had access to media planning tools and I've used them all - Nielsen, @Plan, comScore; in fact, I met with some of the current comScore executive team before they became executives. Usually these services are great for planning, but when you actually made a specific media buy these analyses don't match what actually went into market.

These types of services cost a monthly fee that as a small business owner I find a little tough to swallow and it was a little tough to swallow for the political agency I do work for.  So, that's why I'm a huge believer in Google's Ad Planner tool; the new enhancements including actual ad placements make this invaluable to the small advertiser.  This is just another reason why working with Google helps small advertisers operate like big advertisers without all of the upfront costs:

1. Ad Planner allows you to build media plans and forecasts by demo and geographic targets for FREE
2. Ad Planner provides pretty, professional charts for your plans for FREE
3. Build your own banner ads gives you the chance to run flash ads for FREE.  Sure they are slightly better than average creatives, but did I mention they are FREE?
4. Paid search is the great money equalizer because you are rewarded for great relevancy; plus the geo targeting, time of day targeting, creative building, and budget management are all FREE
5. Google's Content network allows you to buy on a CPC or CPM basis across big and small sites all using demographic and content targeting

The actual media buys themselves of course costs money but you can have everything run via credit card which gives you maximum freedom to lower or increase spends or shut it off whenever you want.  Plus, if you spend a moderate amount per month (~$10K) you can get access to one of Google's account teams.

Yes improvements to the Ad Planner are just another reason why Google is your best friend for advertising, especially if you are a small business or small client.  The only complaint I have with the Ad Planner is the lack of ability to geo-target at anything other than Country, State, Metro, or City; plus the City targeting is annoying because they aren't grouped alphabetically by state, but alphabetically by Metro (try looking for specific cities in Virginia).  However, I'm happy with the tool I have because it does most of what I want for FREE and I know Google will continue to make improvements.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Rupert Murdoch's Google Battle - Not So Crazy

(A quick small post - longer than Twitter, shorter than my normal posts).

I read a few posts yesterday about News Corp threatening to deny Google's spiders access to their sites and this includes the Wall Street Journal.  Now, I had the pleasure of negotiating with WSJ when I was with AT&T and even though I got the better of them for AT&T"s Personal Network plan, it created a lasting impression with me.  I've also advertised with them many times including during the 2008 General Election. While advertising revenues are important to them, they are clearly focused on subscribers.  So I wasn't surprised when Murdoch threatens to block Google.   

Hitwise's Bill Tancer put out some great charts that shows what they think Google's traffic is to WSJ and it is a whopping 25%; plus they report that 44% of traffic from Google is new.

WSJ knows this too.  WSJ journal sees other print companies who give their content away from free struggle with sales revenue - while it is coming in from the web, it isn't fast enough to replace the crash on the print side.  

WSJ has always been about subscriptions first and advertising second.  They know what the true hit would be by blocking Google.  I bet they don't care about the new traffic number.  I bet people will still know about them and the branding from the traffic doesn't matter to them.  Their advertising rates are still super high, so the traffic hit while bothersome, probably doesn't make a dent in their overall revenue numbers.  Me, I don't think Murdoch is bluffing.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Vote Chris Christie in NJ - Your Only Hope To Get Rid of Corzine

Yes you should vote for Chris Christie on Tuesday.  It is our only hope to rid the state of the economy killing, private job shrinking, and government expanding Governor Jon Corzine.   Look I get that Christie hasn't explained how he is going to cut property taxes, restore rebates, and slow down the growth of government.  I get that I really do.  I also get that if you are a conservative he has pissed you off going back to the primary against Lonegan.  However....

1. The polls are tightening and Corzine can still win this
2. Chris Daggett is finished.   He is not surging in the polls.  Perhaps if he started earlier and used online effectively instead of listening to their traditional media agency (see the quote* below from Ali of the Daggett Campaign on why they didn't have any online strategy) he'd have a chance, but he listened to the wrong advisors.
3. Google Trends right now is pointing to a toss up but Corzine isn't far behind; Daggett is finished
4. Obama is extending his influence in the race even though he knows that Corzine has done a terrible job with this state in creating jobs and spurring the economy.

4 more years of Corzine is a horrible thought.  And for each of you saying to yourselves, well if we have Corzine again at least next time we can run a conservative candidate.  That's the wrong kind of thinking that led some of you conservatives to not vote for Senator McCain - and look how that has turned out.

If you are on the fence, vote Christie.  If you are a conservative, hold your nose and vote Christie.  If you want to make a protest vote for Daggett, now is the wrong election for a protest vote; the only thing that matters right now is to ditch Corzine and Christie is the only vote that can do it.  

Sorry true believers.  The way I look at this vote is to get rid of Corzine first and the only way to do that is to vote Chris Christie.

(Disclosure:  I have had ABSOLUTELY NO INVOLVEMENT with the Christie Campaign.  In fact, my 9 year old son still asks me why would I vote for him if he didn't hire me.  Answer: CHRISTIE IS THE ONLY CHANCE TO GET RID OF JON CORZINE)

*Here's the bizarre, campaign strategy killing decision by the Daggett campaign to NOT use online to network, advertise, and generate grass roots support as posted by Ali from the Daggett Campaign (BOLD is done by me). 

"From our research, we have discovered that NJ voters are primarily reachable via TV and other media -- not internet -- and that is why we have focused our efforts where we have. I can imagine you have strong opinions as to how we should be using our money, but actually the media company who has led every successful independent in this country is spearheading our efforts, so we are deferring to the experts."

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

This is Just A Sloppy Banner Ad from Christie Campaign

I don't make much money from the banner ads running on my site.  The reason I have them there is to see ads that run specifically in the state.  Banner ads like this very poor quality display ad from the Christie Campaign.  

You might think I'm picking on them for one banner ad but from the very beginning I've been  writing that they don't get online advertising and modern political marketing.  And with two weeks to go they continue to demonstrate the lack of attention paid to online advertising with this very sloppy creative execution - fuzzy graphics, terrible imagery, and two click to play videos plus, the click through as usual goes to their homepage which shows a lack of understanding on how to drive to the correct message on the site.

Judge for yourself.  Is it any wonder with 2 weeks to go this campaign is in a dead heat? Plus, a third party candidate who also doesn't get modern politics (see the comments left by Ali (daughter?) from Daggett campaign) taking votes from the Republican challenger who looked invincible to some (not me) a few short months ago.  Maybe if the dreaded and well hated Governor Corzine snatches victory from the jaws of defeat, people will finally put to bed any question of the importance of having a well run online strategy.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric 

Chris Daggett's Online Marketing Won't Allow Him to Be Viable

(Disclosure: I received several emails after my last post.  I am not involved with Christie's campaign.  I've never spoken with them.  I do want Corzine to lose and I AM NOT advocating that Daggett should drop out).

Chris Daggett's campaign isn't viable unless he can get into the mid-30s as I wrote last week.   Yes I get that The Star Ledger just endorsed him for Governor and Google Trends' finally has a pulse.  

It doesn't matter.  He has no online marketing. The website isn't ready for prime time, it looks he had a cousin build it for him on a WordPress template.  There are no Google ads trying to direct people looking for information on him.  I've seen no display ads, his Facebook fans are about 10% of his competitors and his YouTube page has little subscribers, little views, and really looks like it is a page dedicated for Halloween.  There are no Facebook widgets to grab.

This isn't an insurgent campaign.  There is little evidence to suggest that.  If this campaign had a chance they would have been employing modern internet marketing techniques, however, I can't find a single piece of evidence that the Daggett campaign even noticed what happened in the 2008 election.  Yes Daggett is receiving matching funds and this allows him to be in the debates which he has dominated so far. However, did anyone stop to ask besides paying his staff and buying political signs what he plans to do with the rest of the money?

Clearly it isn't to invest in modern marketing techniques.  I've heard there was a live TV commercial floating around, but I haven't seen it live.  One has to ask why on earth would they run TV ads in this market?  How many GRPs could they actually buy?  Could it even make a dent in your viewing habits if it could even cut through the Corzine buy?  Does anyone want to bet me there will be a horrible waste of direct mail coming your way to a mailbox near you or annoying robo calls to your home phone?

If this was really an insurgent campaign someone there would have used online to network properly and market his plan.  Maybe if Daggett had started ANYTHING online months ago they would have actually been viable.  Unfortunately for them they didn't and they will end up being nothing more than the General Election's version of the Steve Lonegan campaign which also failed any semblance of a modern marketing plan.

At this point from my cheap seats in Long Valley, NJ Daggett isn't viable.  I get that some people are disappointed with the Christie campaign and hate Jon Corzine.  However, NJ needs to get rid of Corzine first and Daggett can't do it.  I get the idea of a protest vote.  I really do.  This isn't the year for a protest vote.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

P.S. Here's an interesting and short article from the Nation Review called Chris Daggett, Jon Corzine's Bodyguard.  

P.P.S Please read the comments for a response from the Daggett campaign. 

Revisiting Roblox

A few months ago I made this post called Is Roblox Safe? Not Sure So I Blocked It and I've received a lot of traffic from this post.  Some from parents looking for answers and some from Roblox supporters as you can see from the comments in the post.  Usually my answer to these comments is that I have little kids and I don't want them that involved with consumer generated content.  Also, don't forget that the trigger for my further investigation was that my firewall-antivirus software Bit Defender flagged the site as not child friendly.

Well last Friday I received an email from the CEO of Roblox David Baszucki.  He was kind enough to want to talk with me about my blog post.  I guess that means that either a) someone sent him the link or b) he or his marketing team was watching Roblox's google results.  We spoke within the hour of his email...

1. He wanted to talk about which software I was using to protect the laptop (Bit Defender) and they were going to consider adding it to the software they test.
2. He wanted to reassure me that even though the content is consumer generated they flag obviously offensive ones and remove or if something is marginal, but gets flagged as inappropriate they investigate immediately.  
3. He spoke with me about the ads I was seeing and told me that they carefully monitor what appears on the site
4. Finally he wanted to know why I thought they were associated with Lego because they are extremely cautious.

Anyway, I thought he was very professional and that they do try hard to monitor the site.  As I wrote earlier, then later in replies to the comments, and then when I spoke with David, I have little kids and I don't include Roblox on the list of sites they can visit.  I do think Roblox is a lot more professional then when I wrote that post, but for Jacob and Kaela it isn't for them.  When they get a little older - perhaps around 13 I will probably change my mind, but right now, no; I don't even let them on YouTube without me.  

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

NJ Race is Really Between Christie and Daggett

(This is a post for my good friend and college roommate Jim W)

After watching and reading the reports about last week's NJ Governor Debate it is pretty clear this race is really between the two Chris' - Christie and Daggett.  Corzine's fate really rests with Daggett and Christie.  I haven't received and didn't want to dig around for more detailed polling information, but it seems pretty clear to me that around 40% of the voters will vote for the hated, job killing, economic disaster Corzine.   In stock buying terms, that's Corzine's support level.

Christie on the other hand, I have no idea what his support level is.  That's not to be shrill, but I don't have inside polling data to know who are his definite or "1" voters.  Also, for that matter, I don't know Corzine's but he consistently polls around 40%.

Daggett is interesting because he has qualified for state funds and I've seen him poll around 10%.  However, like Lonegan from the primaries his website is horrible, I've seen little social networking, I've seen little search marketing, pretty much not much invested online.  However, in the debates and in the press he is attracting attention and even garnering attention from some of my conservative friends.

The problem for Christie is Daggett.  Usually in NJ you'd get the protest vote,  but this time the protest looks reasonable to a large number of voters.  If Daggett starts polling higher those numbers will come out of Christie.  Check out this recent Google Trends chart to see how Daggett is starting to pick up interest. So that means:

1. Corzine wins with around 40% of the vote (WORST CASE) because Daggett surges into the 20s
2. Christie beats up Daggett and keeps him around 10% of the vote
3. Daggett in a miracle finish beats up Christie enough that he gets more than 40% of the vote

To me, this is the wrong year for a protest vote.  We can't afford 4 more years of Corzine.  Sorry Daggett fans, but unless he starts polling around 30% he isn't viable.  He needs more of a surge and while that is possible and he has some time, I don't think Daggett has the marketing or grassroots support to really make up the distance; too bad he didn't start sooner.   BTW - if you really are a Chris Daggett fan - more power to you, but to the NJ voters into a protest vote against Christie and Corzine, now is NOT the year.

Want to read more, read this post from FiveThirtyEight.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Christie versus Corzine - Old Style Campaigning versus Modern Politics

The polls are getting close right now and unfortunately for New Jersey it looks like my analysis from way early on is not that far off.  This is what happens in the post-2008 election world when you don't employ modern marketing tactics and your opponent does and you seem to lack any visible grassroots support even in towns near your home.  From a new media perspective here's what's going on:

1. Corzine though well hated laid down all of the tools needed early on so that when people were ready to turn back to him (I have no idea why anyone from New Jersey other than the most loyal liberals would) Corzine would be waiting with modern marketing tools.  Plenty of positive and negative videos, Facebook, emails, YouTube, online advertising, and etc
2. Christie's campaign seems to be going through the motions on online advertising.  I can't remember the last time I received an email communication from them even though I get a few per week from Corzine (those include the truly dreadful Maggie Moran versions).  They did start running paid search ads and I do get display ads served to me but they don't seem very targeted other than what I see via Google Content on my website.  Sure they make Facebook updates but you have to kind of be online when they cycle by - that's the good and the bad about updates via Twitter and/or Facebook.
3. From an internet buzz perspective I've received little  to no emails from friends, family or even some Facebook notes regarding Christie.  In fact, if you didn't know better you'd think the election was happening in 2010.
4. Finally, from a search trends perspective, whatever lead Christie had is gone and now I couldn't forecast this race and it looks like a coin flip to the end.

So, I think from a new media perspective it looks grim with 4-5 weeks to go.  I have a few last minute digital media ideas that can still make a difference but can't go into detail yet.  Other than that, I'd imagine the Christie campaign is running an old-style GOTV campaign which means robo and volunteer calls at the last minute, road signs put up by Republican Organizations, and maybe even a little direct mail and door to door.  

If you readers care enough about this state, you should volunteer NOW to help Chris Christie. Pure old feet on the street politics is what he needs right now (except a few last minute digital tricks).

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Google's New View Through Conversions Tracking - About Time

I logged on to one of my political AdWords accounts last night and I saw a new column called View-through Conv. and I was definitely pleased.  Sure it is only for your Content Network campaigns but I'm glad they finally added it because this type of metric has been around for years and as I've written before Google's Content Network is a great platform for display advertising especially for the small business marketer. 

View-through or impression based conversion tracking has been available for a while.  Historically, around 50% of your conversions could be view-through for banner ads with about 80% of them coming through within the first 5 days.  I tested this for search years ago and found that 90% of the latencies come within 1 day so that's probably one of the reasons Google isn't providing this for search.  If you want to read more I've reprinted a short post below that I made almost 4 years ago.  Enjoy the walk down memory lane - I did....

Latency What Is It Good For?

I was asked a few days ago to explain latency or view through/impression sales in a beautiful office overlooking the Potomac River. And, if you don't know either, I'm honored to be the first to explain it to you. Now maybe we can explain a lot of those unknown sales you've been tracking on your sales reports!Have you ever been looking to buy something at your favorite e-commerce site while at work and just before you hit the next button, your pesky boss pops up from behind, so you close your browser. Sound familiar? Well it should. Industry studies (although an old one) show that 75% of all shopping carts get abandoned. Are we to assume that these items are never bought or are they sometimes bought later? Perhaps when the boss is at lunch? 

Let's say (really write) that you are an online marketing manager for a shoe company and you use an ad server to place your ads on your media buy. A potential buyer clicks on your banner, visits your site, and just before they complete the shopping cart, that boss shows up again, and they abandon the cart. However, they show up the next day without clicking on the same banner and complete the sale. Now what? Well, armed with a cookie courtesy of your ad server, a completed sale, and a click on a banner, your ad server should be able to determine which cookie completed the sale and which banner generated the sale. Therefore, you have a latent sale. Sometimes, those pesky consumers never click on your banner and then mysteriously arrive at your site and make a sale; this is called a view through or impression based sale.

Doesn't sound like a big deal to you? Well it should because I've seen average latent sales in the 55%-60% range and the % varies from site to site and from product to product; especially when the product has a long sales process or sign-up page. Several companies that I'm aware only started tracking latents recently and up until then had a large % of sales generated from unknown channels.

Think you know everything now. Well there's a lot more to it especially when it comes to interpreting the number and running campaigns using latent sales. However, that's for another week.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Let's say (really write) that you are an online marketing manager for a shoe company and you use an ad server to place your ads on your media buy. A potential buyer clicks on your banner, visits your site, and just before they complete the shopping cart, that boss shows up again, and they abandon the cart. However, they show up the next day without clicking on the same banner and complete the sale. Now what? Well, armed with a cookie courtesy of your ad server, a completed sale, and a click on a banner, your ad server should be able to determine which cookie completed the sale and which banner generated the sale. Therefore, you have a latent sale. Sometimes, those pesky consumers never click on your banner and then mysteriously arrive at your site and make a sale; this is called a view through or impression based sale.

Revisiting Facebook for Online Advertising

You long time readers know that I've had a love-hate relationship with using Facebook as an online advertising buy; that is specifically buying banner ad space and not for using it for connecting with customers-supporters which I always believed it was extremely useful.  Facebook with its low CPM rates and lack of targeting options coupled with boring ad units put it extremely low on my media recommendation list.  That is until recently. I've become very bullish on Facebook advertising and hope they make more targeting options changes.

On the right is a screen shot of a make believe ad buy (actually it was a real one but I

 can't who it is really for).  So, let's take a tour and describe  what I like about Facebook for advertising and what I think they should still change.

1) The geo-targeting works fine if you want to target by city, state, or country.  However, there aren't zip code, county, or MSA options plus I could really use a bulk upload.  I'd imagine Facebook will be changing this in the future.

2) Other demos like male/female, targeting on a user's birthday, education level and whether you are in a relationship and if you are interested in males or females provides some interesting targeting options especially if you are a dating site (for example) or need to target based on marital status.  Interesting targeting but really this is left over from their college only Facebook days.

3) Now the Keywords is where it gets very interesting.  You have to be a keyword wizard and you have to understand that these keywords are not the kind you would normally search on but really kind of like groups within Facebook of what people put on their page.  The main problem I have with this is that if you enter in more than one term Facebook looks at it as an OR instead of an AND.  For example if you wanted Republicans who like Obama you can't (see below for the exception),  You'll find 2.9 million Facebook people who have Barack Obama on their page but when you add in Republican you get about 3.17 million which is just adding in Republicans to Obama's total.  This is good targeting, but an AND function would be much better,

4) The workplace targeting is very interesting especially if you are going after a certain company.  This is unbelievably cool

5) Connection targeting really only works if you are the Facebook admin so you can target your own supporters or if you want to exclude them.  This is how the Barack Obama admin can target their large fan base and then use keywords to further segment them out.  That's how they could find Barack Obama Republicans.

6) The CPMs or CPCs are dirt cheap still - at this level I like using CPMs so I make sure my ad is shown.  The ad units are not their new sexy units which are usually reserved for their large customers (this should change too soon) and the media is not on a user's home page but on their subpages.  Again this is kind of a bummer if you don't have multiple thousands of dollars to spend, but still quite the non-premier options are quite good now.

I think Facebook is a good tool right now especially with their targeting options and dirt cheap CPMs.  I do hope they make some improvements to their keyword targets by making it an AND and not an OR plus provide the option for lower spenders to get on a home page or get better ad units.  At that point with those three changes, Facebook would explode for the small advertiser.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

comScore Shows Google's Nearly Impregnable Search Fortress

comScore released its August 2009 search numbers and while a lot of people, especially Microsoft fanboys, will be jumping for joy as Microsoft gained core search share by 0.4% to 9.3% and Google dropped by 0.1% to 64.6, I for one don't see the joy.  In fact, comScore's report show's Google's dominance is quite secure and for the moment quite safe.  

You see the numbers that everyone reports is a comScore metric called core searches which is basically searches off of the main search site like Google.com.  However, as any Google fanboy (like me) will tell you, Google is much more than searches off of Google.com.  It includes Gmail. Google Docs, Google Books, News, and of course a little known site called YouTube.  And, that's where things get very interesting.

Look a little lower in the report and you'll see something called Expanded search which lists out all search activity including video and search activity on the non-core sites.  It is this report which shows how dominant Google's search strategy is and why Microsoft has a long, long way to go to catch a giant.

1. Google isn't just 7x larger like the core report shows; all Google properties versus all Microsoft properties is TEN TIMES LARGER THAN MICROSOFT.  Why do you think Google gives you all of those products for free?
2. YouTube while losing some share in August is the second largest search property around.  YouTube is so large that it is 28% larger than Yahoo and twice as large as Bing.  Think about that for a second, if Bing is hugely successful they'd have to knock of Yahoo and YouTube before Google even blinks.
3. You can look at the rest of the sites on the list, but they are so small it really doesn't matter much but they are interesting.  For example, eBay and AOL losing share and Facebook is growing quickly probably driven by their huge growth. 

Yes Bing is an exciting product.  Yes Microsoft is spending $100 million in advertising to boost their search but right now all they have generated is a little buzz and some excitement.  I haven't noticed a blip in the amount of paid search advertising that I've run for clients and I've tried.  I also doubt Google has noticed a blip in their search activity.  In fact, I bet Google is more concerned with expanded search and in that case, Google is STILL growing.  Microsoft isn't even close right now.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

XM Radio Save Program Needs Help

I've been a big fan of XM Radio ever since my Acura came with satellite radio.  XM was a life saver when I would drive to and from Jersey City when I was a managing director at Harrisdirect.  I'd listen to ESPN, Comedy Channel, CNN, and all the different music stations.  Some times the comedy channel was the only thing that kept me going while I was sitting in traffic on the Pulaski Skyway.  When I started my home based business, I added a second radio in my office so I could listen to news, sports, and of course Springsteen once XM merged with Sirius.  

That worked great until about a month ago.  Instead of using some cash in the stock market or leave it in a bank to earn nothing per month, we built this great extension on the house which is now my office. Unfortunately I can no longer get a signal in my office because it is on the North Side of the house and the Southern part of the room is an interior wall.

So I logged on to my XM account but got nowhere with the help menus.  Next I called into listener care which could do nothing to solve my problem, so sadly the only thing I could do was cancel my service since luckily for me, it was a little before my annual renewal.  I had no issues with their customer care, they were professional and courtesy but they couldn't do anything with my signal problem.

However, I started to get bombarded with what I'm assuming is their save program.  Now I love save programs, especially integrated direct mail, internet campaigns.  I also think their approach for customers that left for other reasons would be quite reasonable, but don't they know I can't access their service?  Why don't they know I called in to their listener care and they tried to help me but couldn't.  Is it too much to ask to use data to segment out their list to people that left because they could no longer get a signal.  And, why don't they know I'M ACTUALLY STILL A CUSTOMER WITH MY PRIMARY CAR RADIO STILL ACTIVE?

Why send me this smoking great offer?  If you want me back why don't you send me emails with a different product, some kind of booster, or something that actually addresses the reason I left?  Why don't they recognize I was a multi-unit customer with my other radio still active?  Shouldn't that clue XM in that it really was a move of the equipment and not the price?  I don't think that is too much to ask using modern targeting techniques.

XM, I still love you.  Please turn off the email and direct mail campaigns and save those dollars for a real save.  If you have a non-price solution for me, I'd be happy to turn the radio back on.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Google's Content Network Just Got Better

With the early morning announcement that DoubleClick's Ad Exchange Network is now available in Google's Content Network, you should be very excited.  Now there are even more sites involved and based on my experience with DoubleClick's network, I'd assume that there are some new high quality sites.

What this means for you is that if you were running a Google Surge, you should now go back and ask your Google Reps for an updated site list.  If you had been using Google for placement targeting against certain demographics you should now go update that list.

I'm thrilled.  This gives you more reasons to shift dollars to Google where you get good placements with great targeting and reporting, all with competitive prices via at worst a credit card where you get maximum flexibility.  This already makes a great product, even better.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Fight The Smears versus The Birthers

(Just a fair warning  - I AM NOT A BIRTHER)

The other day while working on an online advertising campaign for one of our clients I came across the following text ad from FightTheSmears.com.  It's obviously an ad trying to debunk the theories that President Obama is not a US citizen.  However, I found this ad interesting on a number of fronts...

1. It is September 2009 which is almost a full three years before President Obama's reelection.
2. I found another ad in Google's Content Targeting network which suggests either a tactic to massively expand out the campaign and/or garner dirt cheat impressions.  Notice I wrote impressions and not clicks.  Text ads in Google's Content Network woefully under-perform and I always recommend to not waste your time with them.
3. They are also running paid search ads to intercept people looking for this information, but what I find very fascinating is that the Google Search Trends on this topic is slowing down and appears to be limited to a few states in the South and West.
4. The actual text ad I grabbed was an in-text video overlay on top of a YouTube video about a California Small Business Owner ripping into her Congressmen at a Town Hall Meeting on Obama Care.  It takes a little more effort to put this ad inro your AdWords system so clearly this is something they wanted to do.

Is the Obama Administration really that concerned about the birther theories that they will run ads almost 3 years before a massive amount of people will care again?  If you ran the trends back to fall 2008 you'll see that the peak was really October 2008 which of course was right before the election.  However, they are spending time, energy, and money to really blast this message out via Google's Content Network and YouTube.  The in-text video overlay clearly shows that they are ok with a very loose targeting and even though it is really out of context (ObamaCare versus Obama's Birth Certificate) they are getting an impression view of the message.  

Then again there is always the flip side that could be happening.  That's is since the Trends are slowing and it appears that most of the significant traffic is from the South and West, wouldn't they be better off just leaving this alone?  Aren't they potentially fueling the fire by keeping this alive and being defensive?  Heck even risking that the impressions that are being served will leave the reverse message in the viewers mind since the ad isn't really in the right context?

BTW  -  just to drive you readers crazy, is it possible that Obama is ok with the wrong message? Perhaps they think that by keeping it out there that they are making the extreme right side of the Republican base seem a little crazier than normal.  Perhaps by responding in this matter they can keep the issue alive, driving a wedge between potential independent voters who may not want to be associated with birthers?

Unless Obama has data for my last theory, at this point I'd recommend shutting this campaign down.  It really makes them look defensive on an issue that has lost steam.  Then again, I wouldn't be surprised that they have polling data to support my last theory.  At any rate, it is clear that the Obama Administration will be a never ending campaign and unlike past administrations the next election will always be front and center.  That's certainly a change from the past.  

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Dear David Axelrod - I Checked Your Facts on Small Business and You're Wrong Again

So I've been spending some time reading the Health Reform Bill currently getting trashed in congress via Open Congress and I'm fired up again due to the marketing by the Obama Administration.  The latest is the propaganda they are spreading on making insurance affordable for small business.  When I read the bill, I see the ability to take advantage of credits, but it is NOT absolute as Axelrod and the rest of the administration would have you believe.  Here's an excerpt from the now infamous SPAM mailing by the Obama Administration with David Axelrod's signature on it...

"Reform will benefit small business - not burden it: It’s a myth that health insurance reform will hurt small businesses. To the contrary, reform will ease the burdens on small businesses, provide tax credits to help them pay for employee coverage and help level the playing field with big firms who pay much less to cover their employees on average."

And here's the propaganda found on the White House Reality Check site

 The plans have a tax credit for small businesses to help them provide health insurance for their workers, to reward them for doing the right thing by their employees. 

So logically the small business owner would think that they are definitely going to get a credit as a reward for doing the right thing.  Right?  No reasons NOT to support this right?  Well as usual the Obama administration plays around with words and sells way too much with something as sensitive as health care.  Here's what the bill actually says regarding the small business credit..

SEC. 45R. SMALL BUSINESS EMPLOYEE HEALTH COVERAGE CREDIT

‘(a) In General- For purposes of section 38, in the case of a qualified small employer, the small business employee health coverage credit determined under this section for the taxable year is an amount equal to the applicable percentage of the qualified employee health coverage expenses of such employer for such taxable year. ‘(b) Applicable Percentage-‘(1) IN GENERAL- For purposes of this section, the applicable percentage is 50 percent. ‘(2) PHASEOUT BASED ON AVERAGE COMPENSATION OF EMPLOYEES- In the case of an employer whose average annual employee compensation for the taxable year exceeds $20,000, the percentage specified in paragraph (1) shall be reduced by a number of percentage points which bears the same ratio to 50 as such excess bears to $20,000.‘(c) Limitations-‘(1) PHASEOUT BASED ON EMPLOYER SIZE- In the case of an employer who employs more than 10 qualified employees during the taxable year, the credit determined under subsection (a) shall be reduced by an amount which bears the same ratio to the amount of such credit (determined without regard to this paragraph and after the application of the other provisions of this section) as--(A) the excess of--‘(i) the number of qualified employees employed by the employer during the taxable year, over (ii) 10, bears to‘(B) 15.‘(2) CREDIT NOT ALLOWED WITH RESPECT TO CERTAIN HIGHLY COMPENSATED EMPLOYEES- No credit shall be allowed under subsection (a) with respect to qualified employee health coverage expenses paid or incurred with respect to any employee for any taxable year if the aggregate compensation paid by the employer to such employee during such taxable year exceeds $80,000.

Ok, now I can't quite figure out all of this jargon but here's what I do understand and why the Obama Administration is WRONG for promoting this in absolute terms because there are quite a number caveats on the credit:

1. You receive NO CREDIT for an employee that makes more than $80K per year.  That's not so good in a bunch of states like say New Jersey. This exception also means that the owners of these businesses are also counted as employees, so probably you are NOT going to SEE ANY CREDIT for your own health insurance.
2. The credit gets phased out by some percentage if your TOTAL company payroll is greater than $20K which means the only way to get the full 50% credit is if your entire payroll is less than $20K. Wow that's generous.
3. Finally the credit is also reduced by some percentage if you employ more than 10 but less than 15 employees.

Seriously people does this sound like the Obama Administration should be marketing the small business health credit in the manner in which it does?  Right off the bat all of your HIGHLY PAID EMPLOYEES INCLUDING THE OWNERS WHO MAKE $80K OR MORE ARE EXCLUDED.  Then if you have other employees, you've probably already busted the $20K payroll threshold so any credit you make on anyone making less than $80K will be reduced.

I think the Obama Administration should be ashamed of themselves for marketing the small business credit in this manner.  It is definitely not an ABSOLUTE credit and probably at the end of the day small businesses will be better off paying the fine and pushing employees to the public option rather than providing the benefits with these potential credits.

Am I wrong?  Let me know.

Eric

Chris Christie is from Mendham, Right?

I'm getting worried about the NJ Governor race and it's because Chris Christie lives in Mendham NJ.  Huh?

Well the last few weeks I've had to take my wife to Morristown for health reasons.   The route we take is through old route 24 from Long Valley, through Chester and Mendham and then up through to Morristown. Here's a Google map of how we drive that route. Now some of you don't know the area but driving along old 24 is a mix of homes and small business until you hit the green in Morristown.  I know this way very well because besides being two towns away from where I live, I used to drive this way to AT&T by cutting down through Medham to Bernardsville-Basking Ridge NJ.

Chris Christie lives in Mendham NJ

Here's a Mendham street view by one of the big curves.  As I said very small town USA looking.  You know what I've noticed while driving to Morristown?  Not one single Chris Christie for Governor sign.  NOT ONE. Now, I don't expect to see them in the usual no man's land where political signs pop up (see this YouTube link for Long Valley's favorite area), but to not see a single sign in Christie's hometown is worrisome.

Chris Christie lives in Mendham

Perhaps you are thinking, well that's a main road, did you pull off and check out the side streets? The answer is yes.  We spend a lot of time in Chester NJ.  Chester and Mendham share a high school and are in the same high school district with Long Valley. We cut around the main traffic in Chester and take a lot of side streets.  One of our favorite cut downs is past Bernie's.  That bypasses old 24 and is just homes and farms.  There are no signs on people's lawns.  In fact, I haven't seen a Christie sign in Chester or Long Valley or Mendham and

Chris Christie lives in Mendham.

What this tells me is that there is very little grassroots support and that has me worried.  Sure they have 5900 friends on Facebook but for a state the size of NJ that's not good.  I'd expect to see some signs on people's lawns a few months before the election in the very Republican areas but to see nothing is very worrisome.

Chris Christie lives in Mendham

My assumption is that the Christie campaign is using the old big donor/TV playbook which coincidentally is the only playbook that the Corzine campaign will have.  Corzine is well hated in NJ so any drumming up of grassroots support (Corzine has 9500 fans on his official Governor Facebook page and a truly horrific 3300 fans on his election page) will be futile so the only thing Corzine will have to do is tap into his big donor group, especially the Goldman millionaires, wait for Obama to help him, and blast with negative TV spots. 

Basically this fight will be Christie TV ads versus Corzine TV ads with Obama pumping him up for good measure.  The polls could be tightening and without critical grassroots support for Christie, this has me worried.  Too bad they didn't start their digital grass roots campaigning earlier and

Chris Christie lives in Mendham.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Obama, Pelosi and The Marketing of Your Health Care Reform

I get a morning briefing every day from RedState and one of the links today was about a paragraph in a White House blog post about reporting misinformation on health care reform.  Put aside the scary notion of not qualifying what misinformation means which was the point of the RedState post, I went a read the White House blog post and watched two videos.  Now before I come to some conclusions here are four points that worry me and what I find interesting about President Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Health Care Reform.

1. Obama clearly stating I believe in 2003 that he is a proponent of a Single Payer Health Care Plan.
2. Candidate Obama denied he was for Single Payer Health Care Plan unless it was from scratch, which he knows is/was an impossibility
3. White House video of a questions and answers with President Obama on the public option with the public option not being a "must have"
4. HuffingtonPost article with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi saying that she does not have the votes to pass health care reform without a public option. (I linked to HuffPo article because HuffPo is friendly towards the left)

Ok so here's what has me worried.  President Obama is a proponent of a Single Payer option but he knows he can't get it.  The public option is the next best thing.  Passing health care reform without a public option won't happen according to Nancy Pelosi because the liberal votes on the Democratic side of the House won't agree to a proposal without it.   And, that's what's so fascinating and so scary about this situation.

• Nobody likes listening to Pelosi.  She is ground zero for partisan politics.
• The American Public historically gives low marks to the House. However,
• People still like President Obama, but
• Obama knows that he doesn't have the votes without a Public Option so he can use smooth words to say - it isn't a must-have for the Administration and he can also use smooth words that say - well if the private sector can't compete with the public version well, isn't that the free market at work?
• President Obama gives great news conferences but Pelosi is his attack person.  Basically a good cop-bad cop tactic on health care reform.

I don't believe a private sector company can compete with a massively funded public option.  Private sector companies have share holders and profit/loss statements while the public option has Congressmen who need to please roughly 51% of their voters and are devoid of profit and loss responsibilities; plus, the Government can keep funding them more and more with a single vote or change the rules to benefit the public option.

To me - this is as simple as FedEx & UPS versus the US Postal Service for home mail delivery (not packages and next day air).  If FedEx and UPS could actually deliver letters (ie mail) to your home, the US Postal Service would have been finished a long time ago.  However, we keep the USPS in business by allowing them to increase the cost of mail and by NOT allowing the private sector to deliver mail into your home. (BTW - here's the language about the USPS monopoly via the Wikipedia link above - FedEx and United Parcel Service (UPS) directly compete with USPS express mail and package delivery services, making nationwide deliveries of urgent letters and packages. Due to the postal monopoly, they are not allowed to deliver non-urgent letters and may not use U.S. Mail boxes at residential and commercial destinations)

Once the public option is in force, any rules can be set to force any real private sector companies out of business.   That's what worries me about the Health Exchanges.  This really is the march to Single Payer

President Obama is smooth and gives reasonable sounding, view graph deep answers that makes you sound like an idiot if you don't agree (hence the misinformation paragraph on their website - see below).  He knows he doesn't have the votes in the House, but he lets the House leadership do his dirty work while he appears to be pragmatic. Fascinating and scary at the same time.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

-------------White House Blog-------------

There is a lot of disinformation about health insurance reform out there, spanning from control of personal finances to end of life care.  These rumors often travel just below the surface via chain emails or through casual conversation.  Since we can’t keep track of all of them here at the White House, we’re asking for your help. If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov.

Florida's Archaic Election Laws

The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday on a ruling by the Florida Election Commission that St. Petersburg Mayor Candidate Scott Wagman's ads on Google appear to violate state disclosure laws even though exceptions already exist for bumper stickers and buttons and the click thru URL did contain a disclosure.  My friend Kate Kaye also reported on this ruling as did techPresident's Nancy Scola  who supplied a local news video in the article.  After reading these articles plus some of the testy comments left on them, here's my take on what's going on since I've run quite a lot of political paid search, social networking, and banner advertising in the past few years :-)

• According to the video Scott Wagman relied heavily on the internet to get his message out.  That's good for him.
• Scott believed (guessing here) that Google ads and Facebook ads were kosher without the disclosure as per Federal guidelines that gave an exception to these small ads.
• Florida's Election Commission believes the ads violate their state disclosure rules.  They give exceptions for bumper stickers and buttons, yet didn't think about search ads EVEN THOUGH NATIONAL CAMPAIGNS RAN A TON OF ADS DURING THE PRIMARY AND GENERAL.
• When Hillary Clinton finally launched her paid search campaign they used some of the characters for the disclaimer which resulted in this terrible creative. Is this what the Florida Election Commission wants to have running?
• Look, don't try and tell me that Florida's Election Commission never noticed the national ads in the past few years so to not take some time to issue updated guidelines and then flag a local guy using them is well, pure BS.
• A lot of local elections have a lot of, how should I write this, personal issues and some times (not all), a competitor or competitor supporter files a complaint.  I don't know if that's the case here, but it seems strange that the campaign relying on online advertising gets flagged.

Generally speaking I'm a state's right kind of guy but this is a case of where the states are clueless.  To turn a blind eye to what's going on at the national level and rule on a campaign that desperately needs the internet is shameful.  BTW - it highlights that Google has a long way to go in policy education.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Corzine Sucks and So Do His Banner Ads

I really can't stand Jon Corzine.  I met him a few years ago in Nobu in NY when he was a Senator; I didn't like him then and I certainly don't like him today.  In fact as a US Senator he did less damage because the Democrats in this state voted in another liberal Senator to take his place so their vote results didn't deviate.  However, as this post pointed out, he has done a lot of damage to this state and deserves to get dumped.  That's why these display ads that run via Google upset me.

Let's take a look at these frames starting with Frames 1 through 3.

• From a flash technology standpoint these are are just slightly more technical than a GIF ad from 1997
• The blue is ugly as is the annoying caricature of Governor Corzine as he thinks deep thoughts on how to drown this state some more in taxes.
• Now to the text "He saw this national recession coming so he did something about it.  He created the first economic stimulus plan."  As the graph I posted in this previous post shows, our upward climb in job loss started October 2007 and continues to this day to NJ's highest unemployment in the past 20 years.  So when exactly did this "sage" see this and what plan did he put into action?
•  He didn't see anything coming.  He didn't put anything to motion. 

Frames 4 through 5

•  OK - same bad design format - nothing new or exciting
• However, more spins on this so called action plan about attracting and retaining business, creating jobs, etc".  NJ ranks dead last in business environment thanks to Corzine.
• While Obama's stimulus plan may create some jobs sometime late 2010, there just isnt enough "stimulus" right now to help Corzine by November 2009. 
• The ads end with the same boring, blue, white and ugly caricature. 

The ad is utterly useless.  It doesn't stand out and is almost as annoying as Lowermybills.com; those ad suck almost as much as Corzine sucks as Governor.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

The Corzine Dangers Lurking Online for Chris Christie Campaign

I've written a series of post regarding the year's NJ Gubernatorial race and up until recently the lack of online advertising that I've seen has been disappointing.  That is until the Jon Corzine campaign started to put the Obama online advertising playbook into action.  The Chris Christie campaign however, remains in the internet advertising fog of war with the occasional email message or Facebook post.  This of course has me very concerned because this state needs to make Corzine a one term and done Governor.  Here's what I'm seeing:.

• Facebook - Both candidates have low involvement. Corzine 09 page has 1665 supporters while his Governor page has 9588.  Christie has 4681 fans.  Christie's numbers are a nice jump since the last time I looked but Corzine has lost some (no surprise, but more on that later).  I do get messages from Christie, but few and far between.
• Email Marketing - The Corzine campaign is good for about 3 per week while the Christie campaign maybe sends one out once per week and that's very sad.
• YouTube - Check out the pages of both candidates.  Not much going on here for either of them.
• Paid Search - Corzine has launched a newbie style paid search campaign with only minimum changes to the text ads and clicks driven to the homepage (very search marketing 101).  However, Christie is doing ZERO marketing here which is scary.  The only support he is getting is from John McCain's Country First PAC (hmm I wonder who is directing that) and some enterprising 529 groups.  BTW - this image shows that Corzine is advertising on Christie's name.
• Display Advertising - Corzine is already running them and while they are decently constructed showing some planning for the ads, they once again show a lack of creative optimization and click through to the homepage.  Christie - ZILCH but support from similar folks from the paid search area.
• Website - Corzine's Quantcast profile shows a heavy slant towards wealthy women while Christie shows no real demo patters.  The site traffic screen shot shows that Corzine's campaign's web traffic growth has exploded (I wonder what online advertising does for you?).
• Polling Data shows that Christie is still ahead but Corzine has reversed his downward spiral and his poll growth increase surprising looks like his website growth.  Plus, most Jersey folks aren't paying attention now and are thinking about the shore which makes the numbers unreliable.

What does all mean?  Well Corzine will be the text book example of what happens if a candidate without Obama's charisma, grass roots support, imagery, and likability does by using Obama's marketing playbook.   Hopefully the Christie campaign has more modern marketing tools in their tool belt come Labor Day but it will be an uphill battle given Corzine early foray into online marketing.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Corzine - Using Obama's Marketing Plan without Obama's Personality

Well the NJ General Election for Governor has started and Corzine's campaign has wasted no time in borrowing Obama's Marketing playbook.  I've already received about 3 long emails from them plus links to videos on their YouTube video channel (I can't bring myself to link to anything to do with that campaign, so sorry). 

Their latest state of the campaign video is actually a compete joke when they talked about how brave Corzine was after his accident which was self inflicted when he refused to wear a seat belt while his driver was speeding on a highway on his way to an Imus interview.  As a reminder, here's Corzine's accident story so I find it appalling that his campaign would in any way shape or form describe him as being brave. 

Anyway, Corzine the Governor has 9200 Facebook friends while Corzine the Candidate has about 1900 friends.  So this got me thinking....

• Corzine's campaign studied Obama's campaign playbook and will try hard to duplicate it
• However, Corzine is well hated and is already trailing Christie in the early polls.  Corzine's approval rating is at 35% and his unfavorable rate is holding steady in the mid 50s.  I don't remember ever seeing Obama with those kind of ratings.
• Corzine can't give a speech and can't even pass himself off as a man of the people
• and finally, it is extremely hard to run a grass roots networking campaign when you don't have the charisma of Obama and can't generate passion among the voters when you are well hated by the electorate.

However, what Corzine does have going for him is a crap load of money and President Obama.  If you watch any of their boring, poorly shot videos or read any of their novel sized emails you'll see that

1. They will not run on his crappy job, economy, and spending record
2. They will push the linkage with Obama and Biden
3. They will pump up Obama's spending, stimulus plan and feature Corzine as a friend to the administration
4. Tie into anything to do with Obama - my guess is Corzine will only frequent the same restaurants as Obama and start smoking the same cigarettes. 
5. Paint Christie as a friend to the "vast right wing conservative conspiracy"  even so much as linking him to Sarah Palin even though there is little to no evidence of this

Corzine will do anything and spend anything to win.  He will have President Obama with him, so I do hope the Christie campaign starts quickly on their internet strategy, otherwise we are just handing over that territory to someone who does not deserve reelection.

BTW - Hat tip to my friend Mark.  The knuckleheads at camp Corzine prove my points with their "ineptitudeness" on natural search results.  Clearly they know how important natural search is from Obama's marketing playbook, they just don't have the experience to the plan into correct action.  Here's a screen shot of the natural search results for the keyword "jon corzine".  Clearly the Corzine campaign will be the case study of marketing like President Obama without Obama's skills as a campaigner or without the experts who ran his eMarketing campaign.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric.

Why Lonegan Lost, Christie Has Work to Do, and Corzine Isn't Dead Yet

By now you know that Steve Lonegan lost to Chris Christie in the Republican Primary to take on well hated current Governor Jon Corzine for NJ's top job in November 2009.  As I was driving to my Union NJ office building yesterday I had on NJ 101.5 and listened to all the Lonegan supporters whine about how stupid the other NJ voters are for voting for Chris Christie.  I heard people moaning about how Christie bought the election and how Christie fooled them.  This got me really fired up.

The Steve Lonegan campaign failed to get their message out.  It wasn't that Christie's marketing was so slick.  It wasn't.  It wasn't that Christie spent boatloads of money in the primary; he didn't.  The failure of Lonegan's campaign rests clearly with their campaign for failing to use any modern marketing techniques as was demonstrated by the 2008 Presidential campaign.  You can read these past posts to see how I was tracking Lonegan's lack of modern marketing.  Lonegan's campaign relied on:

• NJ 101.5 to pump out his message.  This is preaching to the converted
• Paul Mulshine which again is preaching to the converted
• Direct Mail which is a complete waste of time and money
• The occasional well hated robo call

Basically the Lonegan campaign used an old school playback for political marketing which didn't allow his message to spread virally,   What did he miss?

1. Paid search ads to interrupt the masses with messages while they are looking for information
2. Email communications targeted to Republican voters in NJ for pennies on the dollar
3. Display ads on popular NJ sites
4. Facebook for voter activism and grass roots organizing; don't get fooled by the 2K Facebook supporters.  They didn't employ any networking techniques and barely used it to push out messages.
5. YouTube views were pathetic
6. Where was the ability to get supporters to talk to their friends and pass out messages via Facebook or some other online organizing?

I'm catching up on some old reading and found a print out of an Esquire article regarding Obama's campaign manage David Plouffe.  Inside it has this line which wasn't quoted but makes a lot of sense that he could have thought it or even said it. "We have to beat Clinton. She has the establishment support, she has this huge system of money-raisers, so we must create an alternative network."

Substitute Christie for Clinton in the Primary with Lonegan and now Corzine for Clinton in the general election and you see why I'm concerned about beating Corzine in the fall and why Lonegan lost.  In NJ or any other state for that matter, you can not just rely on old school political marketing playbooks.  You must use modern marketing techniques especially when taking on the hated Corzine and here's why:

1. He is rich and can spend boatloads of money
2. He doesn't have to rely on the small donor and can tap into his Goldman millionaires
3. Do you really think President Obama is going to sit on the sidelines of this election?
4. Corzine and Obama will focus on those high populated areas which ALSO COINCIDENTALLY ARE THE CITIES WHICH RECEIVED THE MOST OBAMA STIMULUS MONEY.   
5. If you don't think #4 is a problem, you aren't paying attention
6. If Corzine needs help with his Digital strategy, he can, umm, tap into Blue State Digital for help (Obama's guys and gals).
7. I read somewhere today (NJ.com or Daily Record) that Chris Christie will be accepting matching funds which limits him to $10 million or so.  That virtually eliminates a large TV buy in this state until the end.
8. In order to win, Christie has got to get his message out to voters across the state and shouldn't ignore #4.  In order to be smart about #4 he needs an alternative marketing plan - which would be search marketing, email and display, plus online organizing - basically Obama's playbook.
9. Search marketing is the great equalizer where the biggest spender isn't always the biggest winner.

Lonegan didn't lose because NJ voters are stupid.  Lonegan lost because he didn't get his message out and didn't have his supporters network and organize online.  Chris Christie should beat the hated, useless, NJ economy killing Corzine but he can't rely on going toe to toe with a foe that can and will outspend on old school marketing techniques and a foe who will rely on a popular President to rally his stimulus receiving supporters. 

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Chris Christie versus Steve Lonegan before June 2 2009 Primary Vote

The last couple of weeks I've been traveling all over the state.  I've been in NYC which means a drive down Route 78 to Jersey City to take a PATH to a meeting.  I've visited my in-laws who live 30 minutes west of Milford PA so I had to travel through North West NJ.  I've also been in my Union NJ office and traveled through parts of Morris County.  This past weekend I visited my former college roommate Sam down in Cherry Hill NJ which was a drive down Route 31 to Route 295 over to Route 70 and then local roads to Sam's house.

You know what I've observed?  Few Chris Christie road signs and a ton of Steve Lonegan signs.  If road signs are a measure of grass roots support, Lonegan has a huge following!  In fact, I think my home has received more robo calls from the Christie Campaign than all of his signs I've seen in place. 

Throw in some TV ads I've seen and wasted direct mail pieces and it is clear that the campaigns are employing old-school styled politics.  I'm pretty much confirmed that strategy through the lack of online marketing employed by either campaign.

As usual this campaign will hinge around voter turnout.  The NY Times has a good article on how both candidates are trying to drum up last minute GOTV activity.  Based on the marketing techniques employed and ignored to date, it is clear that a low voter turn out favors Lonegan and an average  one or better (12% of primary voters) favors Christie.  I think Lonegan's conservative message coupled with anti-Obama furor gives him an advantage in turning out the few right wing conservatives that live in NJ.  Pollster.com has this chart which shows Lonegan closing fast versus Christie, so I don't think it is over.

However, as I wrote a while back I think either candidate will have a tough time with Corzine.  Yes Corzine is vulnerable, but neither Republican candidate is actively embracing the internet for marketing or grass roots organizing.  Online networking will be key to market in traditional Democrat strongholds that also coincidentally have large populated areas.  The internet is the great money equalizer and even with a well hated Governor like Corzine, he has too much money, he can generate too much money from all those Goldman millionaires, and President Obama is lurking in the shadows to help turn out his voters to rescue Corzine.

Lonegan or Christie?  Just make sure you go out and vote on June 2.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Dear Christie and Lonegan Campaigns - I Don't Think Corzine is Dead Yet

Watching the NJ Republican Debate the other night and tracking what is happening online for the three main candidates Lonegan, Christie, and Corzine I can't help but wonder about the missed opportunities to communicate and organize locally in NJ.  Right now Corzine is in a lot better shape than most NJ folks think and as both major Republican candidates duke it out, they should be gearing up for a GOTV machine coming their way in the fall.  Here's what the view looks like from my cheap seats in Long Valley, NJ.

• Neither Republican candidate right now gets organizing online.  This is a glaring hole in their strategy come September.  Both have woefully low SocNet engagement and no search marketing to drive interested parties to their website for information.
• Both candidates now are using old playbooks by running TV ads, dropping crappy direct mail, and bombarding registered Republicans with the always friendly and welcomed robo call.
• Supporters are slowly putting out road signs but last Friday I road out from my home to Denville and then back.  Then I drove out to Clark NJ via Route 78 and back through Scotch Plains.  I think I saw less then 6 Chris Christie signs which is shockingly pathetic.  Where is the grass roots support?
• I'm seeing little commentary and momentum in the blogosphere.  In fact, the only guy that seems to drum up any excitement is Paul Mulshine.  Neither side however, seems to send supporters out to popular blogs and articles like that to push their talking points.
• Video content is pathetic at best
• Email communication is non-existent unless you count the occasional Facebook message as email
• The polls found on Pollster.com show that Lonegan is behind Corzine at this stage and Christie holds a decent lead. However, these polls are meaningless in NJ right now because the average voter is not paying attention because we have bigger economic worries or you are gearing up for a well deserved and needed summer down the NJ shore.
• Barack Obama will campaign here in NJ for Corzine and will definitely focus where large areas of voters are found - Camden, Newark, Bergen County, Hudson County, and Union County.  Obama carried this state by 15% - Obama beat McCain in Essex County 240K to 74K.

Using Essex as and example, Lonegan/Christie should focus on using the internet to organize the McCain supporters in these popular areas.  TV ads will be wasted on them there and expensive if you go network; DM is useless.  Only by following Obama's playbook for grass roots organizing online can a Republican be competitive there even when the Obama GOTV machine touches down in Newark Airport.

Until I see some real online organizing activity Corzine still has a good chance to get reelected once President Obama comes to town.  I think it is sad that neither campaign sees the power online for finding and organizing folks in areas that are not normally good areas to market in.

As I've told everyone that has ever asked me, Obama didn't wake up one day with all of those Facebook friends.  That strategy was started a long time ago, so the time is now for Lonegan and Christie.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Kate Kaye's Campaign '08 Book Fills In The Blanks for Me On What Happened

I'm nearly finished with Kate Kaye's book Campaign '08 A Turning Point for Digital Media and as one of the folks quoted within the book I found it very fascinating.  Why?  It fills in a lot of the blanks and lifts some of the fogs of war I was unable to see during the campaign season.  Plus it is a great resource to have at your finger tips if you'd like to get a quick view of the digital media tactics used during the 2008 season.

Kate grabbed a lot of quotes from people that were running or part of the digital strategies for each of the Presidential campaigns and she does a great job of putting them together in very relevant chapters.  She also pulled some quotes from my blog which was completely cool by me.  I actually got a kick out of some of the things I wrote over the past two years.

I learned quite a few things especially what the Obama campaign did with their digital campaign and it of course confirmed how ubiquitous I thought their marketing was.  The book also confirmed for me the lack of digital marketing that pretty much all of the other campaigns did during the season.

• Clinton Campaign - very little online advertising
• Ron Paul - a lot of out sourcing to their supporters who in turn did marvelous things with it
• Mitt Romney - a lot of advanced online advertising experimentation that I was jealous of, but in the end we won the Primary.

Once you read through the chapters you'll also confirm what I've been telling you for a while.  The McCain Campaign did a tremendous amount of digital work, more than every other Presidential Campaign before 2008 and during 2008 with the exception of the Obama campaign.  It is all there in Kate's book for you to read if you never believed what I wrote.  Sure we had money problems, President Bush, and a few other challenges but we accomplished a lot even though we fell short of our ultimate goal.

Kate covers a lot of topics including search marketing, social networking, mobile, online advertising, and other subjects.   Kate's book offers great perspective and insight on the tactics used; it is also a quick read and flows just like her informative ClickZ blogs. Between this book, Kate's ClickZ posts, my blog, and techPresident, you'll get an accurate picture of the digital tactics used during the race for the White House in 2008. 

BTW - Kate's book might inspire me to write my own book on my experiences working with the McCain campaign and Connell Donatelli.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric.

Using Search for Political or News Rapid Response

During the Presidential Campaign season I didn't realize I used search marketing for a very unique tactic - Political Rapid Response.  In fact, while moderating a panel on search marketing at AAPC a lot of folks came up to me after the panel and asked me to elaborate on using search for Rapid Response.  In this YouTube video, you can hear Peter Greenberger at 1:20 singing our accolades using search for Rapid Response. We used Rapid Response in quite a number of very high profile situations including:

• Sarah Palin Defense - Forget about the day she was announced as McCain's running mate which is a whole different story, the story I like to tell is when I was called over to McCain's Hotel in Minneapolis on Labor Day during the convention to fix some search problems.  In particular the truly disgusting blogging stories that tried to say that Governor Palin lied about giving birth to her last baby.  Besides running Rapid Response on that story, we also bought words around the most search on keywords including Palin Nude Photo, Palin is Hot, Palin Vogue Photo and Sarah Palin Photos.
• Joe The Plumber - You can see this post I made watching the search results on Joe The Plumber and you'll see we had a search campaign running within minutes of Senator McCain mentioning Joe The Plumber.  That night I watched that debate from McCain campaign HQ in Crystal City, but had no idea it was going to be mentioned and built that campaign from scratch on the fly.  Not only that, I put in thousands of economic and financial services terms in over night.
• ACORN Voter Fraud - While driving my daughter to a doctor's appointment I had Fox News on when they were talking about a breaking story that involved fraudulent voter registration records submitted by ACORN.  By the time I got home, I built a search campaign around ACORN and waited for the results to pop. It took a few days for the rest of MSM to pick the story up, but when it did, the campaign was already ready to go.
• Countering Joe Biden's Announcement

Rapid Response doesn't just have to be for political campaigns.  Issue Advocacy can certainly use it as well as private companies and even news organizations (ex - Fox Sports).  So how do you actually use search for Rapid Response?

HOW TO USE SEARCH FOR NEWS RAPID RESPONSE

1. Dedicated News Hounds - Of course political campaigns have a war room, but for a variety of reasons I wasn't tapped into it.  I kept Fox News, CNN, and CNBC running in the background of my office so I was very likely to catch breaking stories.  You also of course can use Google Trends multiple times per day. 
2. Google Trends Is Your Best Friend - Even if you get a story elsewhere, Google Trends is helpful because it quantifies how hot a story is and helps get you started with keyword development. 
3. Website Access - The person building the campaign must either have an in-depth knowledge of your website to know where to point the traffic to or access to someone who can build landing pages on the fly.
4. Autonomy - The person or group building the search campaign needs autonomy to build it on the fly.  Sure you might have some legal approvals, but the way to lose out on the traffic is to get bogged down in an approval process.  Don't lose your traffic with a slow approval process.
5. Budget - Some times we were given new budget other times we just used the extra spend available from a very high ROI on search.  This search activity comes and goes and you need money quickly to run a campaign.  Also, keep in mind that some times this search activity is brand new and you might have to suck up a high search bid as Google learns more about the activity,
6. Hire An Expert Like Me

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Lonegan versus Christie versus Corzine - Who Gets eCampaigning in NJ?

I had completely different posts in mind for tonight, but I can't hold my my tongue (really my fingers) any more.  Why?  I am completely sick of receiving 1980s styled political marketing communications from GOP gubernatorial candidate Steve Lonegan. This isn't the first time I wrote about this campaign's lack of progressive (progressive as in new and not liberal) marketing techniques.  However after weeks of receiving the same really wretched direct mail campaigns begging for dollars, tonight was the last straw for me.  Stuffed in my mailbox was a newspaper styled flier with a real cheesy bumper sticker and a return envelope to give a donation.  Not only does this insult political marketing post the 2008 election but it deprived the US Post Office from postal processing fees.

So of course I decided to take a poke around the internet to see what I can find on the candidates.  Now I'm a busy man, so I didn't research all of the like dozen candidates to beat a vulnerable and weak Jon Corzine because well if I can't find the big three advertising online I'm not that worried about the rest.  So here's what I found...

1. Paid Search Marketing - Nothing.  Not a thing.  None of the three are advertising online for people that are looking for information.  This is like shooting fish in a barrel in NJ.  There are tax issues, spending issues, economy, environment, etc that a well thought out campaign could be running to get in front of voters.  Seriously, this is a piece of cake.  It will raise donations, get people to join the campaign, and help voters understand where these candidates stand on issues.  Remember, we won AAPC's best use of new technology award for search makreting so I kind of know what I'm talking about.
2. Social Networking - I joined Christie's as well as Lonegan's Facebook pages.  Corzine I did not join but a quick browse of that page shows almost 9.900 supporters and a lot of information; it has also been updated on a regular basis.  Lonegan has 974 supporters but since joining I've yet to receive any emails/messages via this group.   It also seems that Lonegan is using a ghost writer /ghost Twitterer to make posts.  Chris Christie has almost 3,400 fans and it appears his brother makes semi-authentic messages and posts (I wrote semi because I don't know if he really writes them, but it sure looks like that).  
3. YouTube - Christie loaded up a recent video 2 days ago and has 34 subscribers and his most viewed video has about 1,244.  I couldn't find an official Lonegan YouTube page and gave up looking for it (there were no links from his website).  BTW - same thing for Corzine.
4. Twitter - The Lonegan campaign uses Twitter and has 720 followers but the Tweets I saw look nothing more than press clippings. Christie has 734 followers and Tweets in the same fashion as Lonegan.  Corzine has an account with 140 followers but no Tweets.  Clearly somebody just grabbed the Twitter account just in case they figure out the internet before the fall.
5. Website - Corzine websites is barely above brochureware with no links to any social networking options.  He does have one thing going for him which is a picture with Obama.  Lonegan's site is an improvement over Corzine's but other than the top masthead it is in need of a face lift.  The homepage scrolls forever with repetitive links all over the page and their use of colors in inconsistent.  Sure the site has a lot of information but it is poorly organized.  Quite frankly it needs a MASSIVE overhaul.  Christie's website is beautifully designed and looks like a modern political website.

Based on what I can see, none of these three warrant a rating of A for their eCampaigning prowess.  The best of the bunch is the Christie campaign even though they haven't employed paid search marketing and can do more in the YouTube and online grass roots organizing areas.  Lonegan's campaign with its wasteful use of direct marketing really doesn't seem to get using the internet.  Seriously instead of dropping bad direct mail, improve the website and use search marketing as well as YouTube. 

Christie needs to make some small improvements (search and online organizing), but Lonegan needs a massive overhaul to even get in the game.  Why?  While Corzine is weak and well hated in NJ, he will have the greatest campaigner alive working the phones and campaigning for him in the fall; more importantly President Obama will be campaigning for Corzine in the more populated areas of Camden County, Essex County, and Hudson County.  That means Corzine has a BIG DAWG in this fight.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Obama via FDA Crushing Pharma Internet Advertising

Yes, I know I'm a a week late on this post, but then again I'm not totally aimed at the Pharmaceutical Advertising market since my Dad died last June.  Dad used to always talk with me about direct to consumer advertising especially when it came to internet advertising for these products.  Yes I know my sweet spot is in politics, telecommunications, and finance marketing, but I always held a soft spot because of Dad's interest.  That's why I found this article so interesting in Business Week.

In this week's Business Week they have an article called Pharma Flees The Net. (I couldn't find it online so that's why I didn't link to it.)  Anyway, the article wrote that on April 3 (really April 2) the FDA sent a letter warning 14 of the world's biggest drug companies that their internet ads MUST INCLUDE WARNINGS about risks.  Here's a link to all 2009 warnings and here's a link to one company's letter and a copy of the screen shots that the FDA included.

And what happened?  Poof.  For the most part internet advertising for big Pharma DISAPPEARED; that's right they are gone especially for black box warning products.  I didn't check every search term, but for the dozen I looked for they were gone.  Sure, display ads might be repurposed (at least the bigger banner units) to include warnings, if you can squeeze them in given a reasonable font size and ad specs, but a search ad or a 468x60 is dead without more guidance. (for a more detailed post see this article from ClickZ)

That's right folks.  The tech President Obama via the FDA virtually eliminated an internet advertising mechanism for the Pharma industry.  Of course this hurts Google and Yahoo, plus some of my brothers and sisters in the internet advertising world who relied on Pharma as an industry.  I really wondered what Eric Schmidt thinks of this as an Obama adviser?

Writing of Eric, I also wonder how many agency veterans, digital consultants, search experts etc supported President Obama during the election and are now regretting that vote?  Sure he wowed you with his marketing prowess, beautiful speeches, hope filled messages, and social networking expertise, but did you ever take a look into his policies?  Did you ever think for a second how this would impact the way you earn a living?

Maybe you took your eye off the ball and were excited for your middle class tax cut.  However, you could have just lost a big chunk of your income statement if you relied on big Pharma advertising dollars. 

I saw plenty of internet advertising veterans line up behind Obama during the campaign season; I even got flamed by a few of them for harmless comments because passions ran high.  However, with more regulation comes more change.  You voted for change.  How does that change look on your income statement now?

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

What Twitter Is and What Twitter Isn't

I read two very interesting posts today.  The first one was called Everyone an Instapundit and the second one written by a person I have a lot of respect for Roger Simon, CEO of PajamasMedia was called Top Twitter Target.  Both of them were very similar in that they tout Twitter as a political movement that the conservative political machine gets more than the liberal political machine.  Roger Simon best summarizes this feeling with the following line "It is no accident that Twitter, an extremely non-elitist form, would appeal to the right more than the left. In these times, as those of us in Hollywood know above all, it is ironically the left that is mired in elitism".

Twitter is many things, but it is not some great gift to rescue Republicans.  It is also not something that the liberal world ignores or doesn't understand.  Let's not get all giddy that Karl Rove has a lot of followers and uses it quite often and that we've successfully organized Tea Parties via Twitter.  I watched Michael Patrick Leahy co-found #TCOT (top conservatives on Twitter) and it was a brilliant move.   However, Twitter isn't a strategy, it is a tactic.

• Let's debunk the theory that says conservatives get it but liberals don't.  Google is in discussions to work a deal with Twitter.  Google is run by Eric Schmidt.  Eric Schmidt is an adviser to President Obama. Liberals get Twitter.
• The liberal blogosphere has HuffingtonPost, DailyKos, MyDD and thousands of other sites hanging off these big three.  That generates tons of comments where the action really is.  As an extended member of McCain's campaign (digital strategy, online advertising, search marketing) I tracked how these folks organized and they do quite well with using more than 140 characters.  They don't need Twitter in the same fashion as Republicans.  Sure you can call the liberal blogosphere elitist, but the people involved don't care.
• As much as conservatives and Republicans have tried, sites like Townhall, Michelle Malkin, Instapundit, and Redstate don't generate the same enthusiasm from everyday folks that are not focused 24/7 on politics.  Those people (unfortunately) gravitate towards a site like HuffingtonPost.  I'm not saying that's right, but look at this Alexa ranking.  It isn't even close.
• Twitter is a vehicle to deliver news and organize thought streams.  Uninterested thought streams means no utility.  I'm a huge fan of Eli Manning, but his Twitter stream with almost 9K followers is useless.
• Twitter is an echo chamber of other thoughts, brand messages, and communications.  When it grows up and starts to make money, it will most likely look like Facebook.  Facebook is a place where content is generated and where real utility can be delivered.  Twitter isn't Facebook.
• The cloud imagery of Twitter is perfect.  People Tweet and if you aren't tuned into them you miss them.  Just like clouds float by in interesting shapes that you miss if you don't take the time to look up once in a while.  Twitter gets people involved who are watching that minute and once those Tweets are missed, they are hard to find again.
• Yes you can organize via Twitter.  You can organize meetings and organize messages.  It is a great utility, but to have a political movement you need to get everyday people involved.   There are 200 million worldwide users of Facebook, where do you think everyday, non-politicos are located today?
• Like mobile text messages, Twitter is not a branding tool.  It is a tool of direct action.  Sure Obama announced Biden via a text message but in the corporate marketing world, that was about as noteworthy event as a new price promotion from Vonage.

I'm a huge fan of Twitter, but without content it is SPAM.  Without a Republican message that will deliver better ideas than the Obama administration Twitter won't rescue us in 2010 or 2012.  Tea Parties work because they are a great idea and the message delivered any non-politico can relate to.  Let's not sing about our political Twitter prowess, let's try and come up with messages that will win the non-Twitter masses.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

How To Run a Google Surge aka a Google Network Blast

My favorite ClickZ reporter and Jersey City native Kate Kaye has been on a roll lately when it comes to writing about a seldom used, yet increasing in popularity tactic offered via Google called a Google Surge or a Google Blast.  First she wrote an article about the New York Congressional Race in which the Democrats used a Google Surge, then she followed up with a profile of the Yes on Proposition 8 race, and a blog post naming me (yes yours truly) as the inventor of the phrase Google Surge.

As you can see in the comments I left, yes I did started calling it a Google Surge but it had nothing to do with McCain's strategy of supporting the Iraq Troop Surge; it was simply a surge in spending and the first time I employed it, it was during Bobby Jindal's campaign for LA Governor which he won.

Since Jindal's campaign I've used it several times including the RNC during the 2008 Presidential Race, McCain's campaign during both the Primary Season as well as the General Election season, and in my own race to gain a seat on my town's Board of Education (just ask some of my neighbors who couldn't log on to their PC without seeing one of my campaign ads).  Since the cat's out of the bag (thanks Kate), here's some more details on how and why you'd use a Google Surge.

  THE INS AND OUTS OF RUNNING A GOOGLE SURGE

1. I didn't invent this process at all and never claimed to have invented it.  All I did was listen to my Google Sales Rep years ago that told me I could have my ads run across Google's search and ad sense networks.
2. A Google Surge can work because Google's network reaches about 81% of the internet according to comScore's February traffic rankings.  Google ranks fourth behind Platform A (AOL and ad.com), Yahoo, and ValuClick. 
3. However, Google makes it very easy and transparent to buy across their ad network as opposed to the other three ahead of them.  You can turn it off and on, switch your creatives out on the fly, use their conversion tracking, and adjust your cost bids by site or overall.
4. The only real catch with Google is that you are buying this Google Surge on a CPM basis not on your typical CPC purchase tactic.
5. The amount of money you are spending on a Google Surge is not for the timid advertiser, but you can of course geo-target and time of day target it.
6. Google supplies you with the site list and you can adjust it.  That makes any Google Surge a proprietary strategy unless of course you don't change the site list.  I ALWAYS DO. 
7.  The site CPMs also need to be adjusted, but don't forget you are dealing with 1000s of individual sites so it really takes dedication and knowledge to make the changes.
8. You need to make sure running a Google Surge aligns with your campaign's goals.

Anyway, I have other tricks of the trade for running a Google Surge, but the most important thing for you to remember is to work with your Google account team when setting something like this up.  As my version of the name implies, this will definitely cause a surge in your daily spending.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Our Search Work for John McCain Wins Best Tech Award at AAPC

This year's AAPC (American Association of Political Consultants) conference was an extraordinary event.  Connell Donatelli and Campaign Solutions (basically Becki Donatelli's political companies) won a ton of Pollie Awards for our political and public affair marketing work.  I'm pretty sure nobody has come close to winning abound the 40 awards we got this year.  The one I'm most proud of is the award we won for best use of new technology for the search marketing work we did for Senator McCain.

You long time readers know my involvement in the campaign in the search marketing work, but in my zeal to promote the work I often didn't think I gave enough credit to some of my team members.  It really was remarkable work that a small group of us did all of Senator McCain's work in addition to the RNC's.  We spent millions of dollars for both McCain and the RNC and that was just in the last 10 weeks of the campaign - you folks out there in corporate America would be jealous of the marketing.  Some of my favorite memories.....

• Meeting with Rick Davis as part of the Straight Talk America PAC and listening to early Presidential conversations and political tactics; none of those meetings would have occurred if it wasn't for Becki Donatelli.  I also wouldn't have had the drive or the experience if Becki didn't share her knowledge with me.
• Ryan Waite and Jason Johnson were the creative geniuses behind some of our best banner ads and creatives that we ran.  Most specifically, the hippie Hillary ad that superimposed Hillary's head on a hippie body.  That ad as I remember had click rates north of 2%.  The other famous ad we ran was One Man Video which was a flash ad with 5 seconds of Senator McCain leaving as a POW; the great thing about that ad was that it included video inside standard flash size limits.
• Jackie Huelbig whom I've known for many years was our ace reporting genius who probably had the toughest job around - she had to put up with relentless requests from me and Becki when we had to know yesterday what the results of our search campaign were and how much money we brought in the hour before.  Jackie was also the one that helped me clean up a lot of the ads and loaded up the hundreds of video and display ads into Google AdSense.
• And finally, of course the campaign that pretty much gave me free reign to do what we needed to do; I can only remember one ad that was rejected and that's because I thought it was controversial enough during the Michigan Primary that I wanted a check.

This video that Ryan produced for our AAPC award is a great summary of the importance of our search campaign.  It features Peter Greenberger from Google,  Rick Davis McCain's Campaign Manager.  Friend and former RNC eCampaign director Cyrus Krohn.  Give it a watch - it shows how a well run search marketing campaign can handle rapid response, email and donation generating tactics, all while bringing much needed branding and traffic to issue pages. It really was an awesome experience.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Senator Cardin's Bill to Save Newspapers Is a Waste of Ink

Before I slam the point of Senator Cardin's bill to make newspapers non-profits, let me set the record straight.  If you haven't guessed already, I'm over 40 years old and I only have one newspaper delivered to my house - my weekly local paper The Observer Tribune.  I believe advertising in newspapers is the most wasteful form of advertising any marketer can do and it just isn't due to the declining circulation numbers.  You can't properly target the ads.  You don't know who actually sees your ad.  You can never capture all of the traffic generated from an ad to your site.  Finally, the ads are boring.  I once got kicked out of a meeting with the Bank of Montreal because I argued so much against spending crucial dollars on a wasteful ad campaign in the WSJ.

Senator Cardin's bill to allow newspapers to reorganize as nonprofits to gain tax breaks is an example of the Federal Government's sticking their nose in the free markets where it doesn't belong.  This quote found in the Reuters article that I linked to shows how the reverse logic of Congress works:

"We are losing our newspaper industry," Cardin said. "The economy has caused an immediate problem, but the business model for newspapers, based on circulation and advertising revenue, is broken, and that is a real tragedy for communities across the nation and for our democracy."

Advertising revenues are down because marketers have finally woken up to the scam that is newspaper advertising.  Circulation numbers are down because people can get news faster and in more appealing manners than paper.  The cost structure for newspapers is bloated; these dinosaurs are so slow to react to changing economies that they didn't reorganize fast enough to become smaller and more nimble.

Look people.  If you like your newspaper, that's cool with me.  As my wife noticed the other day we are the only person on our block that doesn't have a daily newspaper delivered.   Do I miss reading the Sunday Paper while eating breakfast?  Nope.  My iPhone works just fine in my house and I don't need to recycle the papers any more. 

Senator Cardin, let the free market decide their fate.  Newspaper's in their current form is nearly dead and that's the way they should be.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric 

Does eBay Need Some Targeting Help?

I got this email the other day out of the blues.  It was a marketing communication from eBay regarding a favorite seller of mine.  Now, I don't remember making this guy a favorite and he is the only one listed in my account, but anyway that's not what gets me on this email.

What gets me is that I have no clue what this guy is selling.  I have no clue why I would be interested in these items.  If eBay took a look at my buying patterns, they'd see that I pretty much only buy Springsteen Tickets, Amazing Spider-man (note the official use of the hyphen) CGC rated comic books, and baseball cards.  That's it.  Really simple patterns.

Instead of looking at that to give me items that I'm clearly interested in, they sent me an email from a favorite sellers with a pleater and some aurora scenes.  I have NO idea what these things are.

So this got me thinking.  What exactly can eBay market to its customers?  Why send emails from favorite sellers that has items I clearly have no interest in.  That's like Macy's sending me a communication for any random item in their store.  It seems very odd for an internet company like eBay. 

If eBay is going to send an email, you'd think they'd make it more targeted than just some random item from a store.  I know there are tons of Spideys going online every day....seems odd to me.  Perhaps using targeted emails better eBay can generate more money....or just shut this stuff down.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Google's Expanding Ads Helps Advertisers and Google Too

Google announced March 4 on both their AdSense blog (for website owners) and their AdWords Blog that they are testing expanding ads placed via 3rd party ad servers in Google's Content network.  I've been running expanding and streaming video ads for as long as I can remember marketing online.  My original use with them was the old Enliven product and I've used BlueStreak, Atlas, Eyewonder, and PointRoll.  So I love them.

Google's version is a little different than what I've run in the past, but here's what they've told both advertisers and website owners.

• The ad expands on a click and not on a rollover
• The website earns money and/or the advertisers pays money on a click sent to a website or on a CPM basis.  So like Google video ads, no money is exchanged on the expanding unit.
• The advertiser must be using one of Google's approved 3rd party ad servers
• The expanding ad won't get larger than twice its size.

The reason Google is doing this is simple.  Expanding ads get higher click rates and while they are not huge jumps, based on Google's volume it provides a slight bump.  Based on my experience, I'd peg rich media increased CTRs at about 10% which is enough to make significant changes to Google's bottom line.  Advertisers love it because the interaction rates (% of people expanding ads and doing things within the expanded unit) are in the low single percentages which is awesome.

Are you an advertiser?  If yes, you should be building expanding ad units and now that you can run them on Google's AdSense network, you'll only pay a CPC if you buy it that way.  This is just another reason why Google dominates the online advertising world.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Skittles.com Revamp - Genius or Did Mars Spend too Much Time at Hot Dog Johnny's?

Twitter was all the rage this morning with the revamp of Skittles.com because it seems the folks in Mars' marketing division revamped the site so it is a 300x250 ad unit with a picture and links.  When you roll over the boxes it can either expands into landing pages or pops up a Twitter search results page or even Skittles's Facebook page. 

Unfortunately for Skittles I didn't see too many flattering posts.  Most people thought the revamp of the site was a hoax to drive traffic.  A lot of people thought that their marketing division spent too much time at Hot Dog Johnny's because they are relying on Twitter for consumer generated content or Facebook.  The Twitter ones could be particularly damaging because people  can post (or did post) unflattering comments that can appear on their homepage.  Or even worse, the frequent downtime of Twitter could display a Twitter apology.  Of course the classic web designers think it is an awful execution.  Me?  I think it is brilliant for a product just like it.

5 REASONS WHY SKITTLE'S REDESIGN IS BRILLIANT MARKETING

1. How much site utility did they have to start, none?  Yes that's right.  Why would anyone go back to this type of site?  Sure if there was a promotion, it would generate traffic, but this is candy.  How many times are you going back to look up the calorie value?  Sure if they had recipes, you'd get better traffic, but for candy? Zero.
2. Twitter Provides Sporadic Customer Updates.  Again this is a low involvement product.  How often are you going to Tweet how great the greens are?  Sure they could be taking a beating today from so called marketing gurus, but after the first few days blow over, they'll have Twitters world wide generating content for them.
3. Facebook Tells You Which of Your Friends Are Fans Too.  Yes.  When you look at the Fans on their Facebook page, you'll more likely than not see some of your Facebook friends who are also fans reinforcing for you that they like Skittles too.  That's an awesome feature because they just turned your Facebook friends into product ambassadors for Skittles.
4. No More Website Content.  No need to figure out how to update the content often.  Let Twitter and Facebook do it for you.  The rest of the site is media information, product information, and contact links - basically low involvement stuff that changes infrequently.
5. Websites Can Be Subservient to CGC.  People will spend a lot more time on their Facebook and Twitter pages (Google too) than they will ever spend on a CPG site like Skittles.com.  So instead of trying to pull people away from pages they'd rather visit, Skittles figured out how to keep their website front and center by making it a DHTML overlay.

I wrote a post a while back asking if you really need a website and it appears the good folks at Mars read a fellow Warren County/Morris County's blog post (Long Valley is about 10 minutes from Hackettstown).  Sites that won't update their content often or don't provide utility to bring people back on a regular basis should pay close attention to Skittles.com. 

Do you always need a website or should you just rely on Facebook and Twitter for your content?  Very interesting question and I wish Skittles.com a lot of success.  I think it is brilliant.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Do You Really Need a Website for Your Business?

I'm back home after spending the past 2.5 days in Atlantic City's Borgata Hotel for some meetings and one of the more interesting comments mentioned was whether businesses (and to an extension campaigns) need websites.  This isn't the first time this has come up so that's why I decided to write a post on it. 

Before I put some thoughts down, if you are an eCommerce site you need a website.  Sure you can use Google Shopping/Checkout but that really isn't an online store for you.  Yes you can go the Amazon-eBay route which will work in the beginning, but eventually you'll need an eCommerce site.  Personally, I'm leaning towards not having my own corporate website and just go the blog route.

10 THOUGHTS YOU SHOULD HAVE BEFORE YOU SPEND BIG $ FOR A WEBSITE

1. Website are often just static pages that tries hard to get you to return over and over again via SEO, bookmarks, emails, etc.  Sure you can add blog components to keep content fresh, but if your site is not primarily about being a blog-news generating site, you are probably better off with other options
2. Now if you have a blog, you probably notice that a lot of your readers get your content off-site via email or more likely a feed readers.  You can still make money in the blog feeds with advertising and then if they want to make a comment they can click over to your site.  However, notice that you can get your message out and brand yourself as effectively offsite as you can onsite.
3. I don't know about you, but my traffic on my site has plateaued in the 150 daily page view range.  Granted I've focused less on traffic in the past 6 months, but I get the majority of my traffic now to my blogs from Twitter links and SEO results.
4. Twitter has changed the way you promote yourself and push information out.  People subscribe to your brand to receive quick, pithy messages and then decided whether to dive in or not.  Basically Twitter can act like your Outlook Preview Pane and once again remember people are primarily interacting with your brand offsite. Also, I personally have way more Twitter followers (560+) then I've ever had on my RSS subscribers or average unique website visitors.
5. Social Network sites like  Facebook have way more utility and way quicker updates then you can possibly have unless you are the king of spending like President Obama.  Your brand in Facebook is more powerful because of the embedded tools, linking, widgets, and commenting functions embedded within Facebook's basic functionality.
6. Have I told you that you can build a great looking website in about 1 hour of work by using Typepad or WordPress?  Now it would be blog based which helps quickly generate content but the ease of use and price (basically cheap + consulting/design fees if you need help) makes it invaluable. 
7. You can even add in Google Checkout to process your eCommerce activity if it isn't too large of a store on your blog site.
8. A combination of landing pages, YouTube channel pages, and Facebook profiles can deliver a cost effective and efficient marketing campaign.  For example, here is the Captain Morgan for President page on YouTube which links over to the key page at Facebook.  I can't go into the marketing details but this combination was very cost efficient at getting 20K+ Facebook supporters.  Think of what you would know about your supporters with this efficient combination.
9. A static website takes resources to keep running including an agency to host and build pages, plus some content management tools.  The cost doesn't just stop once the site is built.
10. Finally, think about how you are going to get traffic coming back and the tools you need to measure what people are doing on your site.  That probably means Google for SEO and advertising and Analytics for your tracking.  Big sites require big expenses for tracking while the blog-Analytics costs you around a cup of coffee.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

2008 Election Recount - Looking at The Obama Rubik's Cube of Marketing

December 10 - 11 I attended the Internet & Politics conference at the Berkman Center at Harvard University and it was quite an eye opening experience for me.  Besides the Harvard faculty, you had various bloggers, political consultants, and members from campaigns - and in particular the McCain and Obama campaigns.  Day 1 was spent mostly going over Obama's grassroots/field campaign and the integration with their online strategy.  That's what it hit me that we were watching the results of a beautifully played out game of chess.

I love chess.  Not because I'm particularly good, but because I love the strategy and tactics.  So much so that both my 6 and 8 year old play and if you're not careful the 8 year can beat you.  The best part of chess is how you can setup an opponent many moves ahead so that by the time they figure it out you have checkmate.  Obama's campaign had all experts fooled right up until the end.   

1. I like Kate Kaye's articles on the online spending and strategies of the various campaigns.  Obama outspent everyone online and the only bright spot we had was politic's greatest search campaign .  However, the disparity in online advertising wasn't the amazing part.
2. Lots of professionals reported on Obama's amazing ground game. It wasn't that the other campaigns didn't have a ground game.  McCain did in the primary and in fact used that with online advertising to win the primaries.  Obama's ground game and networking was awesome, but that wasn't what impressed me the most.
3. Obama's dominance in social networking due in no small part to Chris Hughes was not the amazing part either - though it did towards the end of the campaign cause me to totally ignore it as a viable channel for undecided voters.
4. The constant loading and viewing of YouTube videos was also impressive delivering to Obama $40+ million in equivalent TV viewing.  It wasn't like team McCain or anyone else other than Ron Paul had people spontaneously creating great video that could rival Obama girl, but that wasn't what got me fired up.
5. Finally the almost billion $ raised was key and certainly eye opening and that fueled everything else, but what impressed me the most was...

The discipline the campaign showed to ensure that their website-myBO.com was the central hub for all activities.  Everything fed into this so that they didn't need to use microtargeting they could data mine the information from what people gave them.  They could market in Republican strongholds like Washington Township NJ (aka Long Valley) where even though Obama would get beaten by McCain 2:1 it didn't matter because Obama leaders like Kevin Nedd could organize efficiently and use tools to create events.

People connected to the campaign because of how things fed into their information hub. Obama had all the experts fooled because of the way they viewed his campaign from different perspectives.  At the end of the day, it all turned out to be the same.  An enormous networking organization fueled by a centrally located database.

At an AAPC conference in the summer in NYC I watched Andrew Rasiej on a panel and I thought he was a bit smug.  Not so much that it was annoying, but the kind of smugness you get when you play chess and know that the game was over in about 10 moves but that your opponent is still struggling to win.  I'm not sure if Andrew knew all, but looking back that was what the smile-smugness was about.

Obama had a lot of people fooled for how integrated the campaign truly was.   The really amazing part was how integrated everything was and how well they kept it under wraps.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric   

Obama and Your Online Advertising Business

I almost let out a chuckle this morning when I saw this article from MediaPost called Privacy Proponents Prompt President-Elect to Police.  Why the chuckle?  Well I'm on an online discussion group with many internet advertising experts and during the summer I got into a dconversation regarding political marketing and Governor Palin (you probably already know what side I was on).  To be perfect blunt, I wasn't trying to get into a heated discussion but correct some facts and get the political discussion removed because it clearly violated the list's policies.  One person sent me a particularly nasty personal email attacking me for censorship.  Now I wonder what they think of the MediaPost article and that made me laugh.

The article basically wrote how the Center for Digital Democracy lobbied the transition team regarding online privacy and specifically around behavioral targeting.  They believe the Bush administration got an F when protecting your privacy.  Basically they believe that you are not anonymous and that you should fear the companies that collect your information because you probably don't have a relationship with them.  Of course I don't know what they lobbied about and I'm relying on the article for this post.

Anyway back to the chuckle (now a roaring laugh at loud).  You see even marketing experts were swayed by the brilliant marketing of Barack Obama.  Yet I don't think they ever dug in deep enough into his policies and how those policies would impact them.  Sure they saw Google's CEO working for Obama and thought, well it can't impact my business right? 

Wrong.  If you work at ANY online publisher, agency, or tracking service you better start paying attention now.  There have been discussions in the House of Representatives regarding tracking, cookies, and etc and all you need now is a "tech savvy" President greenlighting more regulation and you CAN KISS YOUR BEHAVIORAL TARGETING AND TRACKING GOOD BYE.

It is no secret that I would never have voted for Obama.  However, one of the key aspects of his administration is how he holds this coalition together.  I believe that Barack Obama stands for many things to many different people and that he connected with people on a one on one basis.  So much so, that I think people didn't dig enough into his background to see how his policies will impact them and this is just the opening salvo.

Once I was using a donation lookup service and I saw that my father donated to a Democrat Senator in NJ.  My Dad was very much a Republican deep down, so I was shocked to see the donation to a Democrat.  I asked Dad why did he make the donation and he simply answered "That Democrat Senator's policies and voting behavior helps the pharmaceutical business and that's where I make my money." 

Obama means so many things to so many different people.  I wonder how long it takes before he starts disappointing people in policies and regulations that they didn't pay attention to when they were so enamored with his brilliant marketing campaigns.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

2008 Election Recount Part 5 - What's The Value of a 300x250 Flash Ad?

This is part of my 2008 presidential election recap.  You can find Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4 on the links above.  This posts looks at the value of a 300x250 flash ad and since that sounds a little boring I'll make this post as a fictitious meeting that never occurred.  Oh and in case you want my answer before reading the post - the value of a 300x250 flash ad is not much these days....

eCampaign Guy - Thanks for coming here.  Let's review where we are with our online ad buys - search and display with only 4 weeks to go.

Marketing Consultant -   Sure.  Well our display buys are going ok.  We had 6 ads in rotation and most of them have CTRs under 0.50% and we aren't getting enough conversions on the back end, so we pulled more out of rotation.  Our best ad in the past year was the "Meeting Unconditionally" ad or Hippie Hillary.

eCampaign Guy - What kind of results did you get with those?  Any other good ads?

MConsultant - Those ads got CTR's north of 2% and the amount of donations and email signups we got from those were through the roof.  CPA's less than $1.  Pre-roll ads worked great for us.  Basically, fun or entertaining or scare tactic ads work the best.

eCampaign Guy - Gotcha.  How's the search doing?

MConsultant - Paid search is off the charts.  We are returning at least $2 in donations for every $1 we are spending, CTR's are awesome, we are driving tremendous amounts of traffic to your Obama attack sites, and maxing out the daily spend.  Any chance to get more money?

eCampaign Guy - No chance to get more money.  Well at least search is returning.  Think we should brainstorm new display ads?  How long will that take?

Creative Chick - Well we can have some new ads for you to look at tomorrow, but your approval process takes some time.

MConsultant - I have a better idea.  Why don't we cancel the remaining display buys and plow all of that money into paid search.

eCampaign Guy - Well, we are getting better results and better traffic.  We still haven't received the results of our branding study so we can't know for sure.  Yes - that's a great idea, let's move it now

Of course the meeting above didn't exactly go like that, but the end result was the same.  Yes for both the RNC and McCain I advocated moving almost all of our dollars into paid search because it was working so well.  The good folks at the RNC and McCain agreed without much of a discussion and in fact pored more money in with a few days to go, pretty much guaranteeing it was the largest political search campaign in the history of politics.  We didn't quite turn off display ads, but here's when I think they were worthwhile...

Eric's Reason's for Running 300x250 Ads

1. Ads that generate earned media
2. Ads that generate internet exposure
3. Google content ads included video ad units
4. Pre-roll video to guarantee a TV like experience
5. Streaming video ad units that are highly targeted

That's it and in that order.  Of course that's after you max out and fully fund your paid search or social networking campaigns.  Right now unless it is via Google, why lock yourself into an ad buy that requires long creative timelines for something if you are lucky gets better than a 0.50% CTR?  You shouldn't because the value of a 300x250 in getting lower and lower; stick to newer ad units and paid search.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

ABC Releases McCain Draft Reverend Wright Ad

ABC News released a draft copy of a potential John McCain Reverend Wright ad today and I wondered what's the point?  I think it is in poor taste that ABC News even suggested that this was something we were planning to do.  Did a media agency put this ad together?  Yes as did many, many other draft ads and guess what the standard approval tag doesn't mean it was a final ad.  I think this ad would have done NOTHING to change the election results.  Senator McCain was correct when he decided NOT to make Reverend Wright an issue.

Reverend Wright was brought up as an issue during the Primary Season.  What happened?  Obama beat Clinton.  A few other groups ran ads during the General Election Season and what happened?  Obama beat McCain.

Obama beat us due to the following three reasons

1. The most unpopular sitting President in recent history
2. The economy blowing up when it did
3. Obama's huge campaign finance advantage

That's it.  Those are the reasons.  Bringing up Reverend Wright doesn't combat any of those three reasons. I firmly believe if the economy doesn't implode, McCain wins.  The polls showed this.  The linkage to President Bush that the Democrats pushed from the very beginning killed us once they could now prove that what these failed policies and lack of oversight of the economy, wall street, banking industry had on our pocketbooks.

People who were to blind to see Obama as a liberal weren't going to be swayed by a Rev. Wright ad.  People who linked the economy to President Bush weren't going to be swayed by a Rev. Wright ad.  We ought to stop dwelling on this and move on to something constructive.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

 

I Am CNBC - Brilliant Campaign Even With Flaws

Are you a regular watcher of CNBC?  I've always been a fan going back to my Harrisdirect days and since about September it is part of a rotation of programming I leave on while working in my NJ office (that would be first Fox and Friends, Mike and Mike on ESPN, CNN, and then back to CNBC straight through to Mad Money).  Anyway, not sure when they started running the I am CNBC ads (the I Am American Business has been around) but I think the campaign is brilliant even if it does have some flaws.

I Am CNBC is Brilliant

1. It puts personality behind the anchors
2. It gives the anchors a chance to talk about what makes them click giving people more of a chance to bond with them
3. The black and white imagery really makes the ads stand out and really lets you connect with them
4. After all the news business is about the reporters and their opinion/spin and less about the actual reporting of news (this helps, but explain MSNBC)
5. Helps them cross sell between shows so that when you are watching one program they can serve ads with a different personality in them
6. The I Am campaign has legs, but...

I Am CNBC Has Flaws

1. This campaign is screaming social networking
2. Where are the ability to leave comments, post your own video as to why I Am CNBC Viewer, etc
3. Why no Twitter accounts, Facebook links, LinkedIn, YouTube, and etc?  This would be a great way to continue the conversation. Sure you probably think that the majority of your viewers aren't using those products, but I'm willing to bet Twitter and YouTube would be of great use.
4. The I Am American Business doesn't seem to resonate with me.  Maybe it is because I can read/learn about their stories elsewhere and I find it hard to believe that all of them are rabid CNBC watchers, besides those come off as paid endorsements.
5. Why no ability to embed videos or widgets on blogs, websites?
6. Did I write how much more interesting this campaign would be if you let people film their own 30 second video as to why they watch CNBC just to get the chance to have it put up on your website?  Save me the excuses of being serious all of the time...
7. Where's Michelle?

Anyway, I love the I Am CNBC and they passed my TiVo test.  Too bad with a little more effort they could have expanded more into the Social Networking world.  One final note, if they did have links to SocNets out there I couldn't find them on searches or links from their website.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Starting Early in New Jersey - Online Support for Jennifer Beck

In Sunday's Star Ledger there was a little blurb (I looked on NJ.com but couldn't find it in 5 seconds so no link for you) about a blogger starting a petition and a website to draft State Senator Jennifer Beck (R-Monmouth) for NJ's first Lt. Governor.  I was actually going to make a generic post on how politicians should get a jump start on 2009, but I'll use Anthony Del Pellgrino's grassroots effort as the example.

WHY IT IS IMPORTANT TO START NOW FOR 2009 ELECTIONS

1. Build Your Online Tools Now - It used to be you can throw up a website, hope people show up but in the end you'd rely on proven techniques like phones, mail, radio, and if you were big enough TV.  You'd work the backrooms in NJ politics and all of that takes time, money, and staff.  Building a website takes a fraction of the dollars needed to run a full campaign and like Anthony, you can put up a decent site with all of the tools using Wordpress (I put my board of ed site up in a few hours with a total amount spent of $15).  Basically to get started, you need a marketing plan and maybe ONE PERSON who knows what they are doing online.
2. Social Networking Supporters Don't Just Magically Appear - I wrote a great post called Why Weren't We More Social which examined some false conclusions regarding Senator McCain's social marketing techniques.  The net take away is that you must start early to really have a conversation and get people involved.  That means building a blog, a Facebook page, a YouTube channel, a Twitter account, and your email-supporter list.  Anthony gets it right by starting now.
3. If You Build It, Will They Come? - Grassroots efforts require seeding - that is people and supporters who are willing to put in time without any long term promises.  They need to make comments on NJ blogs, link to other sites, drive traffic, and put the tools at people's disposal to spread the messages.  Basically, you need to direct supporters onto NJ blogs, news sites, NJ popular sites, etc to generate activity.  As with any grassroots efforts and without paid advertising, this means you need time to gain critical mass.
4. Earned Media Is Your Best Friend - One of my major lessons learned from Senator McCain's campaign and specifically campaign manager Rick Davis is that even when you are down and out, earned media is your best friend.  That means you need to make yourself available to the press - radio, TV, and print in order to get free media. Whether you are officially running or not, the press can do for you what a branding campaign can do for you  - get you brand name recognition.
5. Get Online Experience - Once you put together your marketing plan, you'll undoubtedly have groups of voters that skew online and other that don't.  That doesn't mean that you can't use online tools to contact all of them, but you need to get experience with which ones work more effectively by your target groups.  Plus, when you look at what you need to win at the state level, who knows how many votes you can get in the long tail.   Anyway the beautiful aspect of online marketing is how measurable it is so you can optimize your efforts and get the experience needed before your competition does.

The only critique I'd make regarding Anthony's efforts are to ease up on the length of the posts and that's saying a lot coming from me.  I don't know how he is doing on the other points above (petition right now has 5 signatures including Anthony) so it is unfair to critique.  However, he is setting an example for NJ politicians on how to get a jump now on 2009.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Mike Shields Asks Are Display Ads Dead - My Answer Below

A very interesting article in today's AdWeek by Mike Shields called Is The End Near for Display Ads? and you know what?  I don't think he is that far off.  Before my answer, a couple of interesting points from the article.

• Even those who said they believe in the power of display advertising acknowledged the industry faces a major challenge in proving its worth, particularly as bottom-line-obsessed CMOs fixate on click-through rates for banners that rarely approach 1 percent.
• It’s really the question of brand versus direct response,” said Vivek Shah, group digital president at Time Inc., who recently characterized display advertising as being “under assault.” Said Shah: “In times like this, the balance can tilt towards direct. That’s a challenge for traditional content sites that rely on display ads.”
• Jim Spanfeller, CEO of Forbes.com, ....“Ad networks have pushed the focus back on [cost per click],” he said.
• Carrie Frolich, managing director, digital media at MEC Interaction, ...“The industry is still focused on impressions as a currency,” she said. “People are not impressions.”

This article is one of the most interesting and thought provoking articles I've read in a long time.  I've know Jim Spanfeller a long time and the first time I heard him speak he was guaranteeing positive branding results of display ads on Forbes.com.  Vivek Shaw owes me lunch from back when he met with me at Harrisdirect and I convinced him to put in a broker center with button ads on CNNMoney.com.  I met Joanne Bradford when she was with MSN and she was the executive who helped me get Senator McCain's search campaign in MSN way back for his Straight Talk America PAC.  That's quite a list of who's who in online advertising.

So what do I think of display ads?  They are absolutely on life support and have been for a while.  I doubt they will end, but their dominance in this space is over.   The click rates still hover at way too low of a level, they take a lot of effort to produce, you need a Dynamic Logic study to measure brand impact, and as mentioned above, we unfortunately count impressions not people.  Heck, social networking with its abysmal CPCs and CTRs are far more effective of a channel if you stick to word of mouth marketing.

This is a screen shot of one of the highest clicked ads for Senator McCain's campaign.   Even if I told you the exact CTR it wouldn't matter.  Let's just say that it had a click rate higher than 1% which means that the vast majority of people didn't click on the ad so they didn't watch the video.  Generating donations from banner ads are hit and miss unless we do revenue share.  Even Senator Obama's campaign focused on creating beautiful ads that reinforced his brand and didn't focus so much on post-click actions.  I ran display ads for my own Board of Education campaign, but that was highly targeted, cheap, and had a short timeframe to generate the most earned media and local buzz.

So why are banner ads on life support?  Simple (the details after the continuation link)

1. Google is the industry's best friend and worst enemy (I've advocated recently shifting all online ad dollars to search marketing)
2. The branding argument for display ads is weak at best
3. Creative development takes too long
4. Why do we still count impressions?
5. Marketers demand more than a 300x250

What's going to happen with the display ad?  Costs will plummet and end up where they were in 2001 - mostly performance based.  That is unless we can sell based on individual or focus on better creative types like pre-roll.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric
(more on the continue)

Citi's Bailout Should Exclude Its Bad Print Advertising Strategy

Over the past few weeks I kept seeing bad news on Citi.  53K layoffs, bad loans, stock crashing, and then of course a Government bailout.  Citi is a TOXIC place and of course the marketing geniuses knew this as well as their ad agencies.  That didn't stop them from running a full page ad in today's Wall Street Journal which talked about providing security and securing the future. That ad ran right on the other side of the article about We The People bailing out Citi.

Now before the print zombies come after me, let me write first that yes I get that this ad was made days ago and that it is hard to pull print media at the 11th hour.  HOWEVER, THAT'S WHY PRINT ADVERTISING IS THE WORST FORM OF ADVERTISING THAT YOU CAN (NOW) SPEND TAX DOLLARS ON.

What did that full page ad cost you?  $50K?  Waste of dollars.  How many people saw that ad today?  You HAVE NO IDEA because you can't track print ads.  Subscriber information?  B.S.  Heck if you are still delusional and believe subscriber numbers you still have no idea how many people saw the ad.  There isn't a call to action on the ad so how are you even measuring it?  Some B.S. branding study?  Perhaps GoogleTrends or some site side measurement service?  That is all completely useless at this point.  Maybe you are relying on some useless survey on the site.

Look if you are going to use my money to bail yourself out, stop WASTING IT ON USELESS PRINT ADVERTISING.  You could have cut that money and saved it or plowed a portion of it into your online ad campaign where you can measure and switch out creative in minutes.  I think if you take tax dollars to run your company you should just STOP WASTING IT ON PRINT.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

2008 Election Recount Part 4 - Why Weren't We More Social?

This is part 4 of my series looking at the 2008 Presidential Election.  Past posts are: Part 1 The Palin Effect, Part 2 Monday Morning Quarterback, and Part 3 The Death of Microtargeting.

So one of the questions that everyone likes to ask or write about is why didn't Senator McCain's team embrace social networking?  My answer is, well we did but we were challenged by money, people resources, and our own supporters.

First a little disclosure.  It is no secret that I am not a believer in using social networking sites for PAID online advertising.  That's especially true for MySpace which is where I believe good advertisers go to die, especially if they do direct deals with them.  Facebook, I have a little more faith in, but I am hard pressed to recommend them for advertising too.  YouTube I love and I've run campaigns there; I especially love YouTube because they are powered by Google which always makes me happy.  So, standard display advertising is a waste of money on most social networking sites, but I do (and did) believe they are critical for involving supporters and pushing CRM messages.  OK, so what do I think happened.  Three things....

1. No Money - as much as social networking costs next to nothing when compared with advertising, it still costs money to develop widgets and content.  When compared with Senator Obama, we were at a significant disadvantage.
2. No People - social networking done correctly needs people to do the outreach.  Unofficially I've heard that Senator Obama's eCampaign totaled around 95 and Senator McCain's totaled around 15.  At that level of disparity you have to make choices by prioritizing items.
3. Different Supporters - While I believe there were quite a number of people that supported Senator McCain that would spontaneously create videos, Senator Obama as well as Congressman Ron Paul had a much larger pool of people that would create content.  Here's a screen shot of videos when you search on YouTube for Barack Obama and John McCain (filtered out crap).  Other than "Dear Mr. Obama" and "Obama's Citizenship Problem" the number of positive McCain supporter videos are nowhere to be found and even if they were further do on the list, they would not have nearly as many video views.  Heck, even our best professional fan video - Raisin' McCain by John Rich only generated 152,000 views.

McCain's team had a Facebook page and we pushed messaging through it added widgets, and had 600K+ supporters.  To put that in perspective, we had 3.85 times as many supporters as Hillary Clinton.  Yes, Obama was a monster when it came to Facebook but then again you could argue he had inside help to get him started. We did some advertising in Facebook and for a very small micro-target it performed great, but didn't scale.

We used YouTube from the very beginning.  When the campaign imploded during the Primary season we had to use YouTube to push out video ads.  Web videos was a key strategy for us especially before we won New Hampshire.

The blogosphere was also very important but it was a tough row to hoe prior to wrapping up the nomination and then it took some time after that.  The vast majority of Republican blogs are very conservative writers and those are our activists.  It was BRUTAL during the Primary season.  Town Hall bloggers were rough, Michelle Malkin, RedState, Race42008, and so on.  I should know because I monitored posts.  I made comments.  I reached out to bloggers.  I mixed it up with people.  I interacted with Mitt Romney's army of supporters and took on Ron Paul's zealots.  Town Hall's Hugh Hewitt DROVE ME FRIGGIN CRAZY and years later I still find it difficult to read his posts. 

I marshalled bloggers to help John McCain win TechCrunch's Tech President endorsement.  Heck, who do you think put John McCain's SecondLife together just in case?  If you were one of my Twitter followers in the last month of the campaign you saw campaign posts from the Daily Briefing.  We pushed out widgets, video contests, tried donation gathering from MySpace, Yahoo! Answers, MySpace Townhall, etc and etc.

So when people say John McCain's team wasn't social, they are wrong.  We were very social.  Did we run into the greatest use of social networking marketing in the history of the internet in the form of Barack Obama? YES. 

If we were more social would we have won the election?  No.  We still had to deal withan unpopular President, the economy, and money problems.  Senator McCain's eCampaign Team was VERY SOCIAL and any marketer should be jealous of what we accomplished; that is unless you were on Senator Obama's campaign.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Old School Facelift #10 Chris Christie Steps Down - Strategies for Running for NJ Governor

Chris Christie steps down as US Attorney fueling speculation that he will run for Governor versus Gov Jon Corzine or Richard Codey if President Obama mercifully rids this state of Corzine for an administration job.  Whether Christie runs or not or some other up and coming NJ Republican, running a campaign in NJ is extremely challenging.  We are a diverse state with large population centers in Hudson County, Newark, and Camden/Trenton plus we have the shore and the farming areas like where I live in Long Valley NJ.  We have a major newspaper in the Star Ledger but unfortunately TV is tough because you have to buy in the NYC and Philadelphia MSAs.  Finally if Corzine is still in office, he has boatloads of money so what's a NJ Republican supposed to do....

OLD SCHOOL FACELIFT #10 - CHRIS CHRISTIE RUNNING FOR NJ GOVERNOR

1. Build a website today.  Why?  Besides the obvious reasons, there are plenty of real-time NJ issues like the bailout, unemployment, taxes, NJ budget and you need to get on top of those issues NOW while people are paying attention.
2. Buy a list of NJ Voters  - You'd instantly have a starting database of emails, names, issues, voter registration, etc to start your marketing right.  You'd also get an idea of what your potential base of voters are and where you need to do voter registration.
3. Social Networking - Start building your base of supporters now.  Obama didn't wake up in October 2008 with millions of supporters.  It was started years ago.  Blogger outreach is critical and not just "A" list bloggers.
4. Your NJ Media Strategy Is This - Between now and September 2009, earned media on TV and prints, internet media via Google and other search networks, social networking, and direct mail only for donations when it proves out.  After Labor Day you could go into TV if you have more than enough money.
5. Online Strategist as Senior Advisor - No in NJ it definitely should not be the typical media consultant.  TV in this market costs too much money and the correlation between TV and behavior is sketchy now.  There are far more efficient ways of political marketing and you need someone at the Senior Level that understands how the internet works and why new media strategies are needed. 

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

SendTec Aims for Me and Mortally Wounds Itself Instead

SendTec decided last night to fire off a reply to my past posts that corrected their inaccurate observations and questionable use of data to "prove" their points.  I found their reply strange because it fails to address my major points and instead dives into a micro overview of my posts.  Unlike other search marketing agencies and luminaries who have spoken with me (Kevin Lee and Danny Sullivan) especially after I have corrected them, SendTec decides to roll around in the gutter with their response.  So I need to explain this to them once again...

1. I work for an agency Connell Donatelli who has years upon years of experience in the political world.  We've been running Senator McCain's online advertising from the very beginning.
2. What this means is that we have data, results, and experience so when you try to nitpick that we don't know how to use the keyword insertion tool properly you make a grave error.  Did you ever stop to think that we tested this years ago and have data to back up why we do things?  Nope.  You'd rather assume we don't know what we are doing.
3. When you speak about pay per click costs, did you ever stop to think about what our objectives are?  Don't you think it is in poor taste to comment on tactics when you don't understand the client's objectives?  Would you ever just make gross assumptions when it comes to how a client does things without understanding the client's goals?
4. Why do you think it is fair to comment on another agency's work?  Didn't you break an unsaid rule in the agency world by publicly commenting on another agency's work?  Would you publish something like that for DidIt's largest client?  I am defending my agency's work.
5. Have you ever worked in the political world and for that matter a Presidential Campaign?  You don't have any experience so when you make comments like "I think they should do this" or "now is the time" what do you base your observations on?
6. Your use of state data to prove your point is still horribly wrong and then instead of backing off you try to defend it.  If you knew anything in politics you'd realize that your choice of states to prove your point was off base.  I'd suggest a course in political science or two for you.
7. You aren't furthering the industry.  Unlike HitWise and other information sharing organizations you are a SEM agency.  You are doing this for self-promotion and to try and get a larger share of the budget.  If you were actually trying to "further" the industry you actually would have tried to interact with me when I've pointed out your inaccurate statements and gross assumptions without firing off a personal attack.
8. You make assumptions as to our role in the campaign and how we get our budget.  If you'd have ever spent any time searching (you know "the Google") you would have found articles and posts going back to the primary season which demonstrated what our role has been and how we get our funding.  Instead of doing that, you again made inaccurate assumptions.
9. In all of my posts defending my agency against your attacks I never once accused you of supporting one candidate over another.  You used my lack of referencing you in the WSJ article as proof which again you couldn't have been more wrong.  I didn't mention you because you added nothing (positive or negative) to the article and probably played the role of 3rd party in the article after other folks that the reporter called wasn't available.  You protest too much, so I'm beginning to think that you do have some political motivation.
10. I've made the posts on my blog and on Twitter to give people who truly want to learn and observe an opportunity to see what has been actually going on.  The information is there on my site for you to actually see what's been happening but you refused to view it or acknowledge it.  If you were really interested in pushing the "industry" forward as you claim, then why have you ignored the obvious information?  Instead you post false assumptions and make wild guesses and when I go to defend I'm personally attacked.

It is time for SendTec to move on and focus on whatever your core competencies are.  Clearly it is not trying to attack someone that has been quite open and vocal about sharing information about political search advertising.  BTW - did you catch The Washington Post article on political search called in Targeting Online Ads, Campaigns Ask: Who's Searching for What?   Curious as to why they didn't include SendTec.  SendTec should just stop "reporting" on the political search campaigns.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Watching Joe The Plumber on Google Trends

So I of course heard about Joe The Plumber a lot earlier in the day, but I wasn't sure if it was something that would be needed or wanted in our search campaign.  However, as soon as Senator McCain mentioned it during the October 15 debate with Senator Obama, we knew it would be hot.  Well as I write this post it is the 3rd hottest search term on Google and coincidentally it is behind two other debate topics "congressman lewis" and "repudiate". 

Anyway so within minutes after becoming a debate topic we put it into the search campaign sending it into our Rhetoric versus Record landing pages.  We were the only one there for about 90 minutes and then the advertisers started.  Now you have the RNC (!) and a host of others (see below) but I can't find an Obama ad and I checked in multiple states (correction - I saw an Obama ad about 1AM but that was just as I was going to bed and when I checked at 9AM their ads were gone).

Above is the first Joe The Plumber Google ad and then a screen shot of the other advertisers that quickly jumped on board including a travel company, Superpages.com, and Plumber directories.  The advertising competition around Joe The Plumber keywords is now very very fierce but I wonder if some of these advertisers have th budget to hang in there.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

P.S.  Regarding the Barack Obama text ads when they are live (the ads curiously shut off multiple times per day which is odd considering they have a ton of money) mention "Joe The Plumber's Tax Cut Calculator" and take the clicks to a tax cut calculator landing page.  I find this extremely strange because Joe's point was that if he did upgrade his business he'd be in a different tax bracket and then would get hit with Obama's tax increase.  Sending clicks to this page seems like a bait and switch.  Here's the video...

 

Nice Plug from Marc Ambinder on McCain's Search

Hey, I love it when a well known and sometimes described as all-knowing political reporter comments on our paid search marketing for John McCain, the RNC, and other Republican clients.  It is quite a little feather in the Connell Donatelli cap.  Marc Ambinder from The Atlantic made a small post that got a lot of us fired up today.  Titled Scoring the Tech Innovation, Marc wrote this

"Seems that the Republicans can lay claim to first mastering a total of two: using Google ads to drive traffic to John McCain's website. "

While that little sentance doesn't seem that big of a deal to you non-outside the beltway folks it is a huge deal.  Marc is widely read by political types, especially within both campaigns.  Even though there has been a ton of articles written about McCain's paid search going way back to before the primary season, I can't help but believe this article in the Wall Street Journal is what got people paying attention.  The McCain campaign has ALWAYS been a big believer in paid search activity and even though the media liked to pay attention to competitor's display ads and social marketing we quietly began kicking people's butts in paid search a long time ago.  Now because of this we are working on a ton of search campaigns and Connell Donatelli dominates political paid search.  It just seemed to take a little while for the media to catch up with us.

Oh the stories I will be able to tell after we win the election.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

(P.S. - that's a picture of my two good friends Cyrus Krohn eCampaign director/internet guru and Peter Greenberger ace political director for Google outside McCain HQ at the Xcel Center.

So The Marketing Pundits Finally Figured Out That McCain's Search Is #1

Ever since the Wall Street Journal published an article that demonstrated for the nation our marketing prowess when it comes to search engine marketing, there have been a number of articles and blog comments.  Jonathan Mendez' recent article called McCain Wins Landslide Over Obama in Search Engine Marketing Election was particularly interesting as well as a post from Danny Sullivan.  Nielsen has been reporting our increased banner ad buy and of course proving that we are kicking serious butt in the search engine world. 

I'm glad people are finally taking notice of the truly remarkable work we are doing and have been doing for the Senator's Campaign from Day 1.  We really have been working together - the entire agency, the senior staff, and the eCampaign team.  Sure I make the ads, the keywords, and handle the organization and optimization, but there are tons of people involved and the highest levels of the campaign get what we've been doing and what paid search can do for a political campaign.

Paid search marketing is the great equalizer between budgets.  As long as you are smart, have experience, understand how to optimize your campaign, track back to goals, and have a great understanding on how the search engines work you can out market your opponent even when the opponent has more marketing dollars.  Then when you add marketing dollars to an already proven model, the your opponents won't even know what hit them. 

I always wondered what took people so long to actually track this.  We've been running paid search ads since Day 0 for the Senator's campaign but I guess people finally decided to take a look at reality instead of just believing the hype.  The campaign has been a big believer in search engine marketing from the very beginning and not just recently.  Finally, when you think we should be doing something but don't see it there is probably a political reason for it or a budget reason for it; believe me we know how to run a modern search engine program.

It should be fun over the next 54 days.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric