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Scott Brown’s Google Blast: How Targeted Online Ads Reduced Costs and Brought Victory

by elpresidente | 1:05 pm, January 20, 2010 | 2 Comments

In the present (and in the future), the quickest and surest way to victory will necessitate a walk on the Google side:

Politics aside, you can count Google as a clear supporter of at least one aspect of Republican Senate candidate Scott Brown’s campaign — the use of online media. “He has definitely run a model campaign,” Google spokesman Galen Panger said in an interview with Digits. “He has really adopted every single tool in the Google arsenal.”

There’s been a lot of news out today about how Mr. Brown has used social networking tools to help his campaign against Democrat Martha Coakley for a crucial Senate seat in Massachusetts. But amid all the talk of Twitter and Facebook, a slightly less sexy but still powerful tool has often been overlooked — the campaign’s groundbreaking use of Google to drive volunteers and voters.

Beginning Thursday, the Brown campaign began what’s known as a Google network blast, an advertising tactic that floods Google content network Web pages in a particular geographic area with display ads from one advertiser. “If you were in Massachusetts, pretty much all day every day you would see a Scott Brown ad,” Mr. Panger said, adding that earlier ads encouraged people to volunteer for the campaign, while later ones focused on getting out the vote.

Kate Kaye, writing for ClickZ, points out that this type of advertising could be crucial for a campaign that began the race as a clear underdog in terms of both financing and voter registration. She quotes Mindy Finn, a digital campaign consultant, as saying: “‘When you need to conserve funds, targeting becomes extremely important.’”

The campaign also used ads in YouTube, gmail and search. Rick Klein of ABC News sees the use of online advertising as one sign that the Republicans might have closed the technology gap with Democrats that was so evident in the 2008 election. He mentions specifically the Brown campaign’s success in “using Google AdWords to direct people searching for both his name and Coakley’s to his campaign Web site.”

The People’s Press Collective helped pioneer the same online tactics here in Colorado (see our “Health Care Reform” ad in the sidebar). Our Re|Education camps have provided the basic layout for local grassroots activist organizations to take advantage of the free offerings that a concentrated Google approach will allow. Obviously, Brown’s campaign successfully incorporated the latent “free” tools and leveraged an Internet-driven money-bomb to augment those tools with paid, targeted advertisement.

Right-of-center candidates in Colorado would do well to recognize the trend and move at least some of their targeted campaign messaging to local blogs and other online outlets, especially over the course of the three week election now enabled by mail-in balloting. The days of the expensive, frenzied, 96 hour, last minute TV blitz are waning.

On that note, if any candidate is interested in advertising on People’s Press Collective, please email info@peoplespresscollective.org.

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Category: 2010, Colorado, Elections

Comments

  1.   José
      January 20th, 2010 @ 2:09 pm

    Hmm, ya, I think PPC might know something about this.

  2.   Stats And Facts From Brown’s Defeat Of The MA Machine | ProjectVirginia
      February 2nd, 2010 @ 12:49 pm

    [...] statewide office had a Google Blast ad, which was personalized to that [...]

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