14 DAY TRIAL // Cashing in on all opportunities, that's the Google we have all gotten to know and love. If there's money to be made and a chance to rise a bit higher in the White House's eyes, you can bet that the Mountain View-based company will want a say in it.
The 17th of January was the day that Google opened its first ever dedicated political ad sales office, manned by 25 public policy, corporate communications and sales specialists, "The Guardian" announces. The one and only target of the newly formed division was represented by the Presidents wannabes, and so far it has managed to get Republicans John McCain, Mike Huckabee and Rudolph Giuliani, and Democrats Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards.
The ads will be, as always, targeted and displayed next to significant search results. Niche demographics, that's what it's all about right now, before "Super Tuesday," and as the day is drawing near, there's no telling of the extent the candidates might go just to stay in the race with winning chances.
To say it briefly, the money isn't great for the Mountain View-based company, at least not compared to the usual number it juggles with: 2.4 of the predicted 65 million dollars to be spent in 2008. Paul Greenberger, the head of elections and issue advocacy, at the newly formed Google office in Washington, estimates the presidential election to account for about 1 billion dollars, the most expensive one in history (as it will be the next, I'm sure).
"With advertising they [E.N.: the candidates and their staff] remain quite wedded to tools and platforms that they are used to using, but our job is to teach them that consumers have changed and consume media in a different way. In the US, they spend as long online as they do watching TV," he told "The Guardian".
"You can geotarget as finely as a zip code, so almost to within a mile or so radius of where the voter is. If you want to reach a voter in New Hampshire it means you're not wasting media spend on users in Vermont who can't vote. Refine it even more if you just want to reach women by running on sites like MarthaStewart.com," he continued regarding the techniques that Google would be using.