McCain Campaign More Tech Savvy than Obama’s? [8/28/2008]

Practically every one agrees that Senator Obama has run a tech-savvy campaign, e.g., announcing his pick for veep via text message and the creation of a virulently active social network at My.BarackObama.com.

Not to be outdone, however, Senator McCain seems to have outwitted the Obama camp when it comes to Internet marketing. By way of example, as of last Wednesday, a Google search for democratic veep selection Joe Biden’s name went to a video on Senator McCain’s site. Search terms used “Joe Biden” and “Biden”.

This tactic is an often used by Internet marketers to outsmart the competition. It’s known as ambushing. The way it works is an online advertiser will purchase a competitor’s key search term, then point it toward a product/service on their own site when a consumer searches for the other brand.

In this case, Senator McCain’s camp simply outbid Senator Obama’s camp for the search term “Joe Biden.” Hence, Senator McCain’s camp gets top billing for that spot when a surfer uses that term.

Not content to simply target this term, Senator McCain’s strategists are casting a wider online net to connect with voters, buying search ads linked to such key terms (hence voter concerns) like “U.S. economy” and “housing crisis.” Obama strategists have yet to follow suit, which is a mistake many experts feel because Senator McCain is reaching undecided voters on key issues.

Senator Obama’s strategists defend their online marketing efforts, citing their millions of online supporters who frequently visit their site, BarackObama.com. Nick Shapiro, an Obama campaign spokesman said in the Wall Street Journal article, McCain Seems To Have Obama Beat in One Arena, that “BarackObama.com already has extremely high organic search engine rankings, which helps us limit the number of terms where we need to use paid advertising to have a presence.”

There is no doubt that the Obama camp has used the web very effectively in their White House bid for the presidency. The Illinois senator has raised more money than any other presidential candidate history using the Internet. He’s also recruited more volunteers via this method. Presences on social networking sites like Facebook and YouTube have helped these efforts.

Where Senator McCain has shone is reaching voters on specific issues like the ones mentioned above. The McCain camp has used a much larger paid search advertising campaign than Obama to do this. In July, it had over 15 million sponsored link impressions, compared to just over a million (1.2 million) for the Obama campaign, according to Nielsen Online.

Other Online Media Presidential Campaign Spending Stats Worth Mentioning
Online Display Ads: In July, the Obama campaign had almost 417 million image-based ad impressions. The McCain campaign only had 16. 5 million of these.

Unpaid Search Engine Traffic: 3.3 million for Senator Obama’s site, compared to 1.6 million for Senator McCain’s site (source: Nielsen Online)

Traditional vs. Online Media Spending: Traditional media spending bested online ad spending by a wide margin. Since February, over $300 million has been spent on television ads, compared to only $7 million for online ads by both campaigns (source: TNS Media Intelligence).

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