Yes, ladies and gentlemen, some smart individual made the next giant leap into political advertising on the internet - I saw my first political ad on my AOL IM this morning - a window that stated "How John Edwards can be bad for your health." This linked to a site that's against trial lawyers. Now, since I don't have any particular issues with trial lawyers, nor do I think they are akin to the anti-Christ, I'm not providing you with the site - you're smart enough to find it yourself.
The interesting point in all this is the new steps individual groups are taking to get their message out beyond the traditional television media. Though website ads are a great idea and certainly can raise the profile of your business/campaign/non-profit, many people have learned to ignore these flashing boxes, just as people ignore TV or Radio ads. By reaching for us in new environments, like placing political ads on an instant messaging program, you can reach a new audience that may generally ignore your ads in other mediums, and for a lot cheaper as well.
Finally, the 3rd portion of interest - the fact that IM is an application fundamentally used by either those 30 and under who, to an extent, grew up with this or people at work, who are still under retirement age. Will this depth of advertising have an effect on those disaffected by politics - the 18-30 year olds? That, I cannot answer right now. We'll have to wait a week and check on turnout.
Also - anyone know if AOL's ad-buying policy is a wide-spectrum buy of all IM windows or do they let you segment your buy based on user statistics - i.e., could an interest group purchase ad space on the IM windows of only those who were of voting age, as opposed to purchasing ad space for all IM windows? If you know, please reply to this post - might come in handy to know this in the future.
I'll be back later with more random thoughts, including wolves, and whether or not we should actually base our vote on what a candidate says on the trail.
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