Candidates Find Their Ads In Compromising Positions
As candidates are gearing up for the push in 2008 for the presidential election, many have been spending a lot of money on advertising, but this election is seeing a makeover, with many hopefuls searching for new and innovative ways to appeal to voters of all ages. Online advertising and marketing in all its many subcategories and niche-tracking glory has been the main tool utilized.
This summer, YouTube and CNN hosted two debates for Democratic and Republican candidates with questions coming from voters submitting questions online. MTV and MySpace have teamed up to bring a series of Q&A sessions with various candidates and college students as well as online questions submitted via IM. Democratic hopeful, John Edwards has done a campaign through Pingercast, leaving voicemail campaign messages on the mobile phones of opt-in Pinger users. These tactics have proven to generate positive responses for the participating candidates.
However, not all of channels online are flawless. To say they are would be a gross overstatement. But when Mitt Romney decided to have some of his budget go to online advertisements for his campaign, his camp never realized the ad serving system that they have used, that randomly places ads across its network of sites would place ads for Romney on Gay.com.
This is a problem only in that Romney and the gay community don’t exactly have the rosiest of histories together, according to The New York Times. Banner ads for Romney ran for at least two day in August, showing at an estimated minimum of 32,000 times according to tracking done by AdRelevance, Nielsen Online’s monitoring service.
Romney has been a vocal in his opposition of same-sex marriages and has used this view to attract the support of religious conservatives. This is not the only incident where the placement of a candidate’s ads has been in questionable considering the content they surround.
Mindy Finn, director of Romney’s online strategy was quoted in the New York Times to say “Campaigns have been buying advertising on television for 40-plus years now; they’ve only been buying ads on the Internet for three or four years. It’s more unchartered territory, and everyone’s trying to figure it out.”
Romney also had ads of his run on FanFiction.net, the report continued, which allows users to write their own plots about their favorite fictional characters, or read the writings of other users, including what has been described to be a collection of pornographic scenes between Hermione Granger and Harry Potter.
Barack Obama had an advertisement of his removed from an Amazon.com screen that was dedicated to the book “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.” This had produced an outcry from Jewish groups, claiming this was anti-Semitic.
John McCain had ads running on the Huffington Post site, and Rudolph Giuliani had ads show up on a liberal blog called DailyKos.
Regardless of the occasional blip, online advertising provides unprecedented exposure for candidates as they lobby for the position of ruler of the free world; Finn stated “We have learned. It provides a danger, but there is also incredible opportunity.”
Reader Comments.
Gracious me, Jewish groups complaint and hurl “anti-Semitism” in the direction of the two professors and their Israel Lobby book, and Obama folds like a deck of cards.
This is truly a frightening example of the power of the Israel Lobby with all presidential candidates.
It is really unfortunate as many in the Jewish community including respected academics have evaluated the professors’ book as essential to the debate leading to a resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli situation.
Regards,
Don Adams
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