Online Political Advertising

Yet another reading in the series edited by Julie Barko Germany from the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet at George Washington University, "Best Practices for Political Advertising Online" again brings together the best in the field to contribute chapters on how the Internet is changing the political landscape. Focusing on one of the tools with the most potential for generating profit, paid advertising through search engines and other marketing tactics online, this publication shows that developing an Internet marketing strategy is both beneficial and necessary in today's media environment.

Because online advertising eliminates the physical costs of print and production, political advocacy groups can save time and money through online advertising. Search engine optimization has become more of a profession these days, and hiring someone to optimize your website to drive traffic to it and managae and maintain your online ad campaigns such as Google AdWords could be a valuable investment. Although online advertising is a relatively new field, this publication points out "best practices" in the field and advises groups to plan ahead and budget accordingly. The report also makes a good case for using online advertising and shows how a group can target a particular demographic, and reach voters online.

I compared the search engine marketing, online display advertising, and online lead generation best practices from this report to what we're doing at my organization, the U.S. Institute of Peace. Search engine marketing is perhaps the most important strategy, as it drives users back to your Web site and points them to the content you'd like them to see based on keywords. SEO (search engine optimization) uses meta-tags that are embedded in the code of the website and tell search engines what type of content appears on the page. While at USIP we concentrate heavily on this, we have failed to develop a good set of metrics in order to judge our success. SEO will become more interesting with Web 3.0 - where taxonomy, a standard set of key words to describe a page, will be replaced by folksonomy, a set of words that users develop to describe a page. Tagging and tag clouds will also be an important part of SEO.

USIP has not yet developed a strategy for using online display advertising, although this paper makes a good case for using banners and flash ads across the web to target particular demographics. Creating an online advertising network can help expand the reach of an organization or political candidate's website.

And lastly, the paper talks about using lead generation, or recruitment to gain donors and supporters. Using a CRM like Salesforce can help with this strategy because it will help organizations track people's interests and keep a record of their interactions with the organization, such as by phone, or email, or physical mailings. Although this paper describes lead generation as cost-effective -- in reality, purchasing a CRM database like Salesforce is very expensive and requires an administrator - it is a crucial aspect of reaching and retaining constituents in any political advertising campaign.

Online advertising should also be important to traditional media outlets today -- as more and more are migrating to the web, they will have to look to the Internet for ways to generate profits.