The next time you visit a dating or employment Web site, you
might see a promotion for President Bush or Democratic frontrunner
Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., on your computer.
Despite reservations about the effectiveness of online
advertisements, the Republican National Committee has been running
a large Internet campaign for the presidential election, with
banner and pop-up ads promoting Bush and attacking Kerry.
Pop-ups are ads that open in a separate window when a Web user
accesses a Web site. Many Internet users, especially college
students who are online 24 hours a day, consider pop-up ads to be
more annoying than effective.
UCLA communication studies Professor Tim Groeling expressed
surprise that the RNC is using pop-up ads as a campaign tool.
“It’s not that pop-ups are illegal, it’s just
that if you use it, people hate you for it,” said
Groeling.
Though not with pop-up ads, Kerry’s campaign also dabbled
in Internet ads. It hired Voter Interactive, a political Internet
marketing company, to create a media plan and run a series of
banner ads on Iowa and New Hampshire employment Web sites last
October.
The ads depicted Kerry as the solution to unemployment and was
linked to Kerry’s Web page for his political plan to rebuild
the economy.
Rand Ragusa, president and founder of Voter Interactive, said
more people notice and click on political ads than commercial ads
because of their novelty.
Ragusa said he thinks the market for Internet political
advertising will increase because of the advantages Internet ads
have over television and radio ads.
“The power of the Internet is that it allows you to target
people by geography, gender, age and race. Beyond that, it allows
you to track that in real time,” said Ragusa.
Ragusa added that people are much more likely to click on an ad
when they are surfing the Web than to write down a Web address they
see on TV.
Though the RNC is experimenting with a large online advertising
campaign, most political campaigns currently spend less than 1
percent of their budget on Internet ads.
The RNC did not return phone calls seeking comment.
Michael Cornfield, associate research professor of political
management at George Washington University, said online political
advertising is still in its infancy and has yet to catch on.
Cornfield said, “We’re still waiting for someone to
do for online advertising what Howard Dean did for online
fundraising,” pointing to the success of former Democratic
presidential frontrunner Howard Dean’s online fundraising
efforts, which helped him raise $50.3 million during his campaign,
a record for a Democratic presidential candidate.
Many are skeptical of online advertising’s effectiveness
because less than 1 percent of people seeing a banner ad online
actually click on it.
Pop-ups fare a little better than banner ads, as 12 percent more
Web surfers click on pop-up ads than banners. But because of the
negative response toward pop-ups, many popular web sites, such as
google.com, have banned the ads on their Web sites. Web service
providers like EarthLink and America Online also have tough
restrictions on pop-ups.
Groeling said that rather than Web site ads, he thinks online
political campaigning will move more in the direction of spam
e-mails and streaming media.
Many of the ads shown on TV are available for streaming online.
Many are even getting passed around through the e-mail of
supporters.
Groeling said the streaming commercials allow campaigns to run
more negative ads online because they do not have to state who
endorsed the ads.
Cornfield added that until there are proven successes, online
political advertising will remain in the experimental stages.