The Internet: The Presidential Campaign’s Incontrovertible Instrument

Excluding the Internet from the campaign strategy is a guaranteed failure for the candidates. An official report shared by Google, that set up a team specially conceived to respond to their needs on the Web. “People spend as much-if not more-time on the Internet than in front of the television,” explains Peter Greenberger, head of the new Elections and Issue Advocacy division, located in the Google office in Washington.

If the candidates had, since 2004 with Howard Dean, already invested in the web through social network sites and blogs, today they are moving one step further. The online search giant is proposing AdWord, its advertising service to political organizations and people, and it works. John McCain, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama have all bought key words that are associated with their campaign sites.

The terms “immigration,” “pro-life,” “pro-choice,” “Iraq,” “Alena,” and “real estate crisis” count among the hundreds of key words purchased that make reference to a candidate’s site when they are typed into Google. The sites appear under the “Sponsored Links” tab on the right side of the page.

But the strength of this new Google political marketing is the contextualization of advertising messages. Much like advertising for beauty products appears on well-being sites, the candidates do their self-promotion where their audience is found.

THE INTERNET REINVENTS COMMUNICATION STRATEGIES

Google has partners to place its advertising inserts with all the big news sites like The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, and Politico, as well as with less-known sites that are frequented by the social groups courted by the candidates. “If one of them wishes to address young mothers from families in Texas, we search our network for sites and blogs that target this category,” states Peter Greenberger.

On YouTube, a site that Google owns, advertising is targeted by the user’s age, sex, and geographic location, information required when an account is opened. However, opening an account on YouTube is only necessary if you want to put videos online. But the site keeps this data by default with each new connection.

The democratic candidates are the most invested in the web. This is explained in part by the enormous amounts of money they have succeeded in gathering: 200 million dollars (126 million Euros) since the beginning of Barack Obama’s campaign, 170 million for Hillary Clinton. In spite of a constant increase of expenditures on the Net, “we are still far from the total,” estimates Google, to which the candidates must dedicate between 5 to 10% of their online media budget, while this rate is currently around 2%.

The Internet is the place to reinvent communication strategies in politics. For Andrew Rasiej, co-founder of the TechPresident site, Barack Obama is the only candidate to have truly grasped the web’s potential. “The era of audio or video excerpts of a few seconds on large media is over. When one sees that more than 4 million people have seen a 37 minute video on YouTube, this reflects a shift in mentality,” notes this non-partisan observer, alluding to Barack Obama’s speech on racial problems in the United States.

Transparency, opening, and lack of control are the master words on the web, traditionally foreign principles for candidates’ strategy communication. Republican Ron Paul indisputably succeeded in earning more than 30 million dollars until March, the date on which he officially withdrew from the race. “This proves that behind the command of technology, nothing replaces the political message, a fundamental component, Andrew Rasiej points out, “and Barack Obama has mastered them both.”