Paid advertising a missing link for online campaigns

In today’s Political Insider, Jim Galloway quoted me:

Todd Rehm of Georgia Pundit judges Nunn’s bold online approach as a mark of a “professional and competent” rollout:
Nunn is also aggressively buying ads on Facebook and Google

Two points I’d like to make about the Nunn rollout.

First, it was well-coordinated and timed-out. By the time the announcement was made, a website was online and the paid advertising had started. What’s notable about this is that you can’t just start up Facebook and Google ads; there’s a lead time before they actually go live.

Second, I think it’s insufficiently recognized how important paid advertising was to the Barack Obama digital campaigns in 2008 and 2012. So much attention has been paid to the integration of social media from a qualitative perspective, and the deadly accuracy of the targeting that was enabled in part through the use of social media, but also through targeted paid online advertising.

Here’s an infographic from BusinessWeek that is instructive:

If you’re running a campaign in today’s electorate, you owe it to yourself to learn about online advertising.

Go ahead and try it. Go to google and type in “Georgia Senate” and see what comes up.