Our Media Strategies Editor wonders whether or not there's still life in online political marketing.

Editor's note: if you're in Los Angeles this Thursday (November 10, 2005) you might enjoy the next E-Voter Institute panel discussion on "Advertising in the Age of the Empowered Voter."

Recently, I sat in on a roundtable conducted by the E-Voter Institute at a conference room in the W Hotel in Midtown Manhattan. The E-Voter Institute is an organization founded in 1999 by Karen Jagoda and Nick Nyhan, the founder and head of Dynamic Logic. The organization conducts research on the convergence of the internet and politics, encouraging bipartisan discussion in order to “strengthen the fabric of our democracy.”  As they state on their website, “the mission of E-Voter Institute is to promote the use of the internet for persuasion, organizing, mobilization, and fundraising.”

It was surprising to me to find that most of the attendees were those there to speak on one of three panels to be had during the afternoon.

There were only a small handful of people in attendance that were not scheduled to speak on a panel, and only two of them I recognized as being from a major media property (Knight-Ridder and New York Times), one speaking on a panel.

Early last year, way back in 2004, the online advertising industry had been flush with hopes and dreams of political campaign spending making its way onto the internet. Some estimates were that some $20 million would be spent online for the elections. This isn’t a huge sum of money, but it is something. Excitement and some dreams of avarice ran rampant.

So where were the publishers, agencies handling political advertising, or even members of political parties? Is there no interest? Are they busy with other things? Is there a sense that the conduct of politics online is not something worthy of study?

When all was said and done, very little money ended up being spent on the web for political campaigns last year. Based on figures I pulled just after the presidential election -- which a company I am a partner in, Pericles Consulting, had worked on -- spending online amounted to just one-fifth of one percent when looking at presidential campaign spending.

A brief history of online political activity

A small amount of online political activity had taken place online over the last five years. George Bush and John McCain did some in 2000, Michael Bloomberg in 2001, John Edwards and Howard Dean in 2003. But it’s never been a significant medium for this class of “marketers.”

Then in 2004 -- after Howard Dean’s success in raising significant sums of money through online donations and inspiring impassioned grassroots organization through the web -- the online advertising industry at large took note and got excited.

But nothing materialized.

Is there any there there?

As it is in the terrestrial realm, politics online is primarily a local engagement. It is also a matter of personal passion. The internet’s continuing role in politics is to give voice to those who feel voiceless, while providing those looking for an alternative voice a place to hear it (or read it).

Local media still has the best chance of taking advantage of the political marketing spending. Not all kinds of local media are appropriate, but sites for local newspapers and TV stations are places where political messaging would not feel so out of place. For one, the offline counterparts are places where people have come to expect such advertising. For another, it has long been known that people tend to look at politics through a local lens. Even national issues like immigration are seen by people through the community they live in.

Most of those at the E-Voter Institute forum felt that there was opportunity throughout the online media landscape for political marketing and messaging to take place, but most were not very sanguine about what such a move could accomplish.

Jason Calcanis, founder of Weblogs (recently purchased by AOL), didn’t think that political blogging could generate much in the way of income and so, as a business model, it would fail. The reasons for this according to him are that a) there really aren’t that many people who actually read them and b) the unpredictable nature of the content would keep advertisers away.

But local media is not this kind of entity. Political blogging can be a powerful marketing tool in that it serves as an alternative voice for those looking for alternative voices. And political blogs can be sources for facts otherwise obscured in or by the mainstream press (last year’s Rathergate comes to mind), but as far as being a tool wielded confidently by campaign operatives, it rests outside the pale of their control.

Keeping off the grass

One of the things that came up during the roundtable discussion as a hindrance to online media adoption was simply a total lack of familiarity and comfort with the web or all things technical. Michael Basik of MSHC, an online political consulting agency in Washington, D.C. told the group how he’d recently given a speech to a room full of Democratic chiefs of staff. They were in awe that one could target ads online. He said that since he’s been going to their offices to help them set up RSS feeds on their computers.

But the question remains, why aren’t more political campaigns promoted online in the ways that they are in other media, and in particular television? With as much waste as there is with television, why aren’t political consultants and marketers pushing their candidates or the interests they represent to a better targeted, potentially vastly more efficient medium?

Here are a few tentative answers:

The self as sample: Too often people use themselves as representative of the rest of the world. If I don’t do something that must mean no one does.

Ostensible lack of control of message and its setting: Campaign management has always acted under the precept of message control and distribution.

Efficiency of spending isn’t a concern: There is only one thing that a political campaign is trying to get a consumer to do, and there is only one time they have to do it. The concerns for return on investment are not there. All you have to do is get a vote; the cost for getting it of no importance. Just look at the Bloomberg campaign for mayor this year. The day this article will run is the day New Yorkers go to the polls and vote for a number of issues and local offices, the most important (or, better stated, most visible) is that of mayor. As of the last week of October, Bloomberg has spent $63 million, only a bit of it online. This is a man who is known for being a wickedly prudent businessman. If he was running his company directly these days he’d probably fire the person responsible for that kind of outlay of capital on something that has a guaranteed zero-percent rate of return.

Most citizens are simply not prepared to see political advertising on the sites they visit regularly: While I was working on the 2004 election, people from CNN.com, NYTimes.com, and a few other sites told me that some visitors complained when confronted by political messaging upon arriving at their content. The constituency may be somewhat inured to the shrill negativity of political advertising as it is served up on television, but the close-up and intimate environment of the internet doesn’t lend itself well to that kind of communication style. Political messaging has come down to using a pastiche of simple sound bites and blunt images. Unfortunately, political marketing is not conducted in such a way that allows for nuanced rhetoric delivered in one channel and aggressive vitriol in the other. The internet is still primarily a text-based medium and requires, if just a little bit, something more discursive.

Local media still seems to be the one that has the most to benefit from online political marketing. It presents an acceptable environment to both those doing the messaging as well as the audiences. Non-profit and issues-based initiatives have been more accepting of online media as a viable vehicle for getting their messages out. And new candidates look to be a source for online media trial. As one attendee put it, new candidates (those who have not run for office before) have a very small chance of being elected (something like only two percent actually do), and because of this, they have the least to lose. Being generally unknown and not having been elected before, they can take greater risks in promoting themselves.

But for now, online political marketing is where general consumer marketing was 10 years ago.

Give it time: the grass will grow.

Jim Meskauskas is media strategies editor for iMedia Connection.