A couple of good stories from the past two weeks that I'd thought you'd enjoy. I was too busy with the Board of Education campaign and now that it is over, I'm catching up a bit.
About two weeks back I was down in DC/VA for meetings and
the first night I was there I went to a McCain fundraiser with folks from Campaign Solutions, Connell Donatelli, and the campaign. Towards the end before we scrambled for dinner, I walked up to a true internet legend former eBay CEO Meg Whitman. Whitman knew about our phenomenal Search ROI and was very impressed with it and that gave me a personal boost knowing how large eBay's search campaign is. I can't get into much more about what we talked about, except I asked for this picture with her. Yes I'm in a suit....
Next up was an interview I gave for Mother Jones magazine called Googling for McCain. Believe it or not, I'm always very nervous when I give interviews, but this one scared me the most. Not because of the magazine, but because the reporter wanted to profile me. It seems a friend of hers had some McCain campaign ads running on their website and she wanted to know how they ended up there. So instead of being content after finding out it was Google, she contacted Peter Greenberger who runs politics for Google and then wham - over to me. I've had a few jobs in between AT&T and Connell Donatelli, but all and all an interesting article.
Finally, iCrossing came out with another study on Presidential Paid search campaigns and guess who came out on top? No it wasn't the Obama campaign, it was the McCain campaign (surprise). Kate Kaye from ClickZ had a flattering post on the analysis called Clinton: Bitter About Search Ads? where she looked specifically at paid search instead of lumping in SEO and SEM as some other sites did. Kate highlighted that we spend about twice as much as the other campaigns put together and buy a lot of issue related words. According to iCrossing, "McCain is also the only candidate with paid coverage on competitors’ names in addition to his own, including candidate keywords hillary clinton, barack obama, obama, and clinton," and since some of you remember that we have been quoted as saying we generate $3-$4 dollars in donations for every $1 we spends proves once again how remarkable of a job the entire Connell Donatelli, Campaign Solutions, and McCain eCampaign are doing on paid search. Everybody works on this marketing program and it shows how integrated we really are. Finally, I enjoyed that Kate called me out as "this guy" in the article.
Anyway, that's it for now. You have some good reading and a cool picture of me with Meg Whitman. Of course after that iCrossing study, we'll need to step it up some more.
PardonMyFrench,
Eruc
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