ClickZ: On the Online Campaign Trail

Zachary Rogers examined the online campaign advertising to date, providing a long and comprehensive review of issues and tactics. Interestingly, he found that, by far, the most use of the internet has come from fundraising efforts rather than persuasion ads. While it has proven most effective in that objective, not a lot of money has been spent. It seems political campaign organizations have so far relegated online media to a below-the-line function akin to direct mail, which kind of sounds familiar. Some, though, expect issue ads to soon be spewing from the various "527" advocate groups. Reportedly, the recent success of the JibJab non-partisan political parody - attracting tens of millions of free views - woke up some issue ad groups, inspiring hopes of replicating the viral effort.