07 November 2006

Political Ads: Red vs Blue, Google vs Yahoo

The Rimm-Kaufman Group conducted a study to observe the use of paid search advertising in the final hours of the 2006 US midterm elections (PDF).

RKG queried Google and Yahoo for terms related to the 2006 US midterm elections from November 3, 2006 to November 6, 2006. They found:
  • There are few political advertisers using pay-per-click search engine marketing
  • Political pay-per-click advertisers use Google and not Yahoo Paid Search
  • Most prevalent advertisers within this query set were Accoona (search engine), Gather.com (social network), CafePress (retailer), and GOPSenators.com (National Republican Senatorial Committee)
  • Red ads outnumbered Blue ads 2:1
  • Blue ads were 3x more likely to be negative than Red ads
  • President Bush was not mentioned in any ad
  • Iraq and Al-Qaeda were mentioned only twice in ads
  • Only two ads linked directly to videos
  • Blue ads were longer than Red ads
  • The length of words in blue and red ads were the same
  • Blue ads were more likely to include an exclamation point
  • Red ads were more likely to contain a question mark
From the report:
We believe political pay-per-click advertising is in its infancy . . . we predict campaigns and political action committees will move aggressively into paid search advertising as a marketing channel in future elections.
Red = pro-Republican or anti-Democrat
Blue = pro-Democrat or anti-Republican


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1 comment:

Geoff_Livingston said...

This is absolutely fascinating. You would think the Blue Team would be more up to snuff online, but on the countrary. Great entry.

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