Commentary: Obama's Web ads -- change is yet to come

-- Guest commentary from Kate Kaye, senior editor at Incisive Media's ClickZ News, www.clickz.com, a website specializing in Internet marketing. The opinions expressed here are her own. --

By Kate Kaye, Senior Editor, ClickZ News

NEW YORK (Reuters.com) -- As with everything else involving money in this presidential campaign, Senators Barack Obama and John McCain are pushing online political ad spending to new heights.

Yet the Internet has only seen a fraction of the hefty war chests the candidates have amassed. Neither camp is promoting much change to the old TV advertising-dominated system.

Obama's campaign raked in $66 million in donations in August alone; only around $5 million has gone toward online advertising this year. McCain's campaign doesn't even break out Web ad spending.

The fact is political advertisers typically don't use Internet ads to sway voters the way they do television ads. When it comes to the Web, they rely on things like video on YouTube and their official sites to have persuasive impact.

Not only is advertising on television a tough-to-break habit for political campaigns, they have yet to see online ads affect an election in an undeniable way.

Until there's proof that an online ad moved people to vote for or against a candidate, the first full-fledged Internet election may be far off.

If you've seen an Obama ad online, chances are you've either been searching for information about him, or perusing Web sites like Politico or CNN.com. These are obvious places for the Obama camp to spend ad money online. But the greenbacks are landing in less likely places, too.

Take BlackPlanet.com, where the candidate pays for a "Featured Profile" and image ads enticing members of the African-American social network to click and join his campaign. Or, the decidedly apolitical AllRecipes.com, where a majority female audience of moms coveted by both Obama's and Senator John McCain's campaigns might be found eyeing the ingredients for tonight's lemon chicken. He's also reached out to battleground state voters through ads on sites including Cleveland.com and Tampa Bay Online.

The campaign buys some ads directly from Web site publishers, but most of them are served by Google. Local broadcast TV sites and newspaper sites have also seen some action from the campaign through a local media company, Centro.

Google grabbed nearly 59 percent of the $5.2 million the Obama camp spent online between January and July 2008. Though some of the ads appear as sponsored links directly in Google search results, others were served across the Web through the search giant's vast ad network. Those other sites, in turn, earn a cut of Google's ad revenue.

Why so much for Google and relatively less, say, for the websites of traditional political media heavyweights like the national newspapers and network broadcasters? We may never know; you're more likely to catch Gov. Sarah Palin slathering Sheer Ruby Revlon on a pig than you are to get Obama's staff to discuss their online ad strategy. Yet luckily for me, a reporter covering the Internet ad efforts of the presidential campaigns, the Obama team lists where it spends its online ad dollars in its Federal Election Commission reports. Unfortunately, the McCain camp does not go into such detail. Obama is using Google for both search ads on Google's site as well as display ads running in its network, placed across the web on other sites. The real attraction for Obama and McCain, and what allows Google to compete so well, is the way its ads are sold on a cost-per-action basis. With Google, the Obama campaign pays only when a Web user performs an action, such as clicking on the ad, or going further to donate or sign up for e-mail invites to speaking events.

Targeting is attractive too. Google allows the campaign to have ads delivered to specific states, cities, or zip codes, as well as having them placed with certain types of content, like lemon chicken recipes.

McCain's campaign has placed ads all over the Web since early last year, even if Obama jabs his rival for his impaired computer skills.

The online approaches for the campaigns differ slightly but I would characterize both as pretty cautious and very focused on clear-to-measure impact and results.

Both share the same main goals: fundraising and collecting supporters' e-mail addresses. The Obama camp and Democratic National Committee are also using Web ads to promote online voter registration -- recognizing new voters tend to favor Democrats.