Fascinating Nuggets of Ad Information
By SusanUnPC on August 7, 2008 at 6:00 AM in Advertising, Barack Obama, John McCain
(1) Whose videos do you think are the most popular this week at You Tube? McCain’s or Obama’s?
–> McCain’s video channel comes in 5th. Its 230 videos have been viewed by 1,155,207 people this week.
–> BarackObamadotcom’s video channel comes in 36th. Its 1,079
videos have been viewed by 364,351 people this week.
– That, by the way, puts McCain AHEAD OF, and Obama BEHIND, the likes of some comedian named Fred, another comedian named kevjumba, a Taiwanese named gar6301 (do check this one out!), the chatty sxephil, and even the Associated Press and johnbytjohnb (photo right), for pete’s sake. Obama is also behind pussycat0930:
Now that’s sad, Barack.
Well, it can’t be that people are simply sick to death of hearing about you.
(2) McCain has bested Obama in ad buys during the Olympics, $6 million versus $5 million.
(3) Gas Station TV (who knew?!?!) — which reaches 17.5 million trapped customers per month — has announced it will not run Obama’s ads, according to Advertising Age magazine:
For consumers already feeling abused at the pump, there will not be the additional pain of political advertising on gas-station screens this election season. Despite claims from the Barack Obama campaign earlier today [how typical is that!] that one of the candidate’s energy-policy ads would be running on Gas Station TV, the company says that just isn’t so.
“This is the ad that the Obama campaign was claiming would run on GSTV,” reports AdAge:
By the way, Evan Tracey, a columnist for Ad Age, thinks that the McCain ad is “pure genius.” From “Why the McCain Ad Works“:
There has been a lot of hand-wringing about the recent McCain ad that compares Barack Obama to Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. I have read numerous sources and watched talking heads who have panned the ad as over the top and in poor taste. I have to say as a nonpartisan ad analyst, I think the ad is pure genius.
The reason I like the ad is simply that it works. It takes a pie-in-the-face approach to advertising. The ad shocks the viewer by asserting that Obama is the political equivalent of a party girl, inciting viewers to reconcile this charge and not turn off the ad, forcing them to stay tuned for the punch line: Obama will raise your taxes and import more foreign oil.
The McCain camp is now making this ad a third of its current ad rotation, airing it more than 350 times a day. It’s clear they think they have something that connects with voters. I think they are correct. …
Here’s another amusing article at Ad Age: “Ludacris Hands Obama a Mixtape, Republicans a Hand Grenade.”
And, Google has gotten into the “Web metrics” business: “Google to Unveil Web-Measurement Service,” June 24, 2008. Editor & Publisher reports:
Google is in the works to roll out Web analytic tools that will compete directly with measurement firms like comScore and Nielsen Online (owned by E&P’s parent company).
Google’s data will be partly based on information from servers. Google’s service, unlike comScore and Nielsen, will free. In addition, Google will offer marketers demographic information about users in a similar strategy to Quantcast (another measurement company that uses a mix of server and panel-based data to capture Web usage).
According to The Wall Street Journal’s Emily Steel, “Google’s approach aimed at bolstering its ad-sales business, could pose a major threat to the Web measurement services that are available now, ad executives say.”
But Steel also quotes some advertisers who are leery of giving Google too much power citing that the online giant already controls a large stake of advertising. “For an advertiser, the last thing you want to do is to have your adviser be the same person you are spending your money with,” Sarah Fay, head of Aegis North American, told Steel.
E&P has covered the issues of both server-based and panel-based metrics. …
And that’s it for today. The news you just HAD to have!
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, the novel by John Le Carre, a new motion picture starring Gary Oldman and Colin Firth.
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