techPresident - Nevada - Comments

Really? "Nothing" to learn?

Read Scott Martin — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 15:59:40 -0500

I think the Obama campaign might have reason to quibble with that. Put yourself in their shoes. How do you go about finding out that your buy was errant - mistargeted or mislaunched, it makes no difference - when you only have five days from launch to the next important election date.

Do you think the network or the agency alerted the campaign to the mistakes, or was it left to the campaign to discover the error on its own?

Accountability is not a topic to shy away from, if we want to continue developing confidence in the interactive medium.

Didn't Mean to Imply It Wasn't Factual, But

EricFrenchman — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 16:49:00 -0500

I don't believe pointing out something that was obviously a minor mistake is news. It appears to me to be petty and looking to embarrass the campaign. I felt the same thing about the Romney campaign running on unwanted sites, but unfortunately because of his stand on that issue it was newsworthy for some.

Everyone has made minor mistakes in online advertising and the more media you buy the more mistakes you are going to make. We need to get past gotcha moments especially ones as trivial as this. This just fuels the flames that you can't trust online advertising.

What good can possibly come from this? There is NO learning to be gained from pointing out this minor event. Nothing.

Consider it a cautionary tale

Colin Delany — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 13:36:15 -0500

Hi Eric, I agree with you that things like this are ultimately trivial and shouldn't be a "gotcha" against a campaign or against the general concept of online advertising. But that doesn't mean that it shouldn't be reported at all. At the very least, other campaigns should know that things like this can happen and be prepared when they do. In this case, Alan's piece was entirely factual and should cause no embarrassment to the campaign.

Colin Delany
e.politics
http://www.epolitics.com

Other campaigns using Eventful

Alex Hunsucker — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 13:04:52 -0500

Actually, Ron Paul and John Edwards are not the only campaigns using Eventful extensively. Huckabee, Thompson, and Obama are all using the site in the same way to message supporters in primary states about upcoming events.

Obama has let everyone know throughout Nevada about all his appearances, as Huckabee has done in both MI and SC. Huckabee has even asked his supporters to Demand him around the country so he can use Eventful to notify his supporters and build crowds in future primary states. Meanwhile, Fred Thompson has posted an Eventful calendar on his website about his Iowa and South Carolina bus tours, not only letting his supporters know about events, but also all of Eventful's users, as well as our 500+ data syndicators.

Many of the campaigns are using Eventful to build crowds at campaign events through our local messaging tools, actually turning online activity into real world crowds.

We Need to Move Past Things Like This

EricFrenchman — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 12:40:05 -0500

Alan,

Why is this news? So the Obama campaign had an incorrectly geo-targeted ad run and it was corrected. Either they placed it wrong by mistake or the network made a mistake. Either way it was fixed.

We as an industry need to move past obvious mistakes that were corrected as quickly as possible. Post like this do nothing to help campaigns want to run online advertising. Pointing out that online ads can be fixed quicker than offline is not a significant selling point.

Eric Frenchman
Chief Internet Strategist
Connell Donatelli Inc.

Both political parties are ignoring the web

davidfarrar — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 11:58:20 -0500

While political candidates are increasingly cognisant of the communicative power of the web, I venture to say, most political parties are absolutely frightened to death of the web's vast communicative power. Whoever has the power to effectively communicate, has political power. It is precisely for this reason the communicative power of our major political parties has largely been taken over by the moneyed interest and the political elite, least someone tells the people.

As a classic example of this process in action, please go to," How to throw the 2008 election".

ex animo
davidfarrar
The National Online Party