So the political world was all in a tizzy because President Obama announced he was running for reelection. I know what a surprise. Of course, it launches all of the political campaigning spin including how the campaign is going to be different, built from the ground up without any big TV campaigns. Of course you know they are coming - that's where he spent the vast majority last time around.
Back in 2007/2008 he promised to be a different candidate rising above partisan politics and making all sort of campaign promises from staying within campaign finance laws, closing Gitmo, not going to war without Congressional approval, single payer health care, fixing the economy, letting the Bush tax cuts expire, and so on. However, rising above partisan politics is what attracted people not normally involved in politics with that hope and change message.
Well, what I found very curious was how their initial online ad buy was very much partisan. In fact, so blatenly partisan that I was surprised and spent 15 minutes out of my busy day looking around for his ads.
Of course I found text ads on Google (can't let his buddy Eric Schmidt down) but that's not where the real money was spent. I found giant take over ads (full page ads shown here) on Huffington Post, The Daily Kos, and Talking Points memo. Pretty much the big 3 in the liberal news/blogger world. Clearly Obama's target was his base but has it shrunk so much that they only wanted to target the liberal sites?
I looked on CNN. Nothing. NY Times, LA Times, Politico, MSNBC, Washington Post, and even slid down the liberal news/blogger list and found nothing - nothing other than on those big 3. Could the President really have put a cap on his online ad budget at launch and only went with those 3 sites?
And really, The Daily Kos? Have you actually read the comments and blog posts made there? Do you really think The Daily Kos attracts independents? Has your base and budget shrunk so much that you had to make The Daily Kos a critical component for your reelection campaign. Don't tell me you didn't need to advertise on CNN because you would have earned media - clearly those big 3 sites would be drooling over your campaign too. At least with the NY Times you'd catch non-liberals reading the business or sports pages...
I'm a little surprised about how obviously partisan this ad buy was at launch. It didn't even look to try to find people other than his base.
PardonMyFrench,
Eric
P.S. I know this was very unscientfic and there may have been other buys I didn't see, maybe even hyperlocal ads
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