Googling For McCain

News: Meet the Republican internet strategist who spends his days buying keywords.

By Casey Miner

April 16, 2008

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When you see the word "Vietnam," do you think of John McCain? If you spend time searching for words like "U.S. Naval Academy" and "World War II," might you be a potential McCain supporter? Eric Frenchman's job is to find out. The AT&T employee turned Republican internet strategist spends his days acquiring—and discarding—the Internet search terms known as Google AdWords in hopes of getting as many people as possible to visit McCain's website, join the mailing list, and, most important, make a donation.

AdWords are the content-based ads that appear off to the side of many Web pages. Most often, they're just little blue hyperlinks; sometimes, they're larger banner ads. To deploy their ads across the Net, businesses buy keywords from Google and determine how much they're willing to pay for each click. Words can cost anywhere from a few cents to a few dollars, depending on demand, so the more you pay, the more likely your ad is to appear on a Web page. The process is also competitive: To get top billing with popular election-cycle words like major issues and the candidates' names, campaigns (and pollsters, and T-shirt salesmen) have to outbid each other. Conversely, if you sign up to host ads on your website, Google's search technology combs your pages for keywords and delivers relevant ads. Every time someone clicks on an ad on your page, you get paid (though how much depends on a variety of factors, including how much the advertiser has bid).

For Frenchman's team and other political campaigns, the AdWords program offers the dual benefit of bringing the candidate's message to people who aren't necessarily looking for it, as well as to those who are. Take the example of my friend's website dedicated to reviewing old Nintendo video games. To generate a little money from the venture, he's added AdWords. There's no political content on the site, but one particular review discusses a game set in Vietnam, and contains words like "hostage" and "POW." Off to the right, readers are likely to see an enormous banner ad for John McCain '08.

"Perhaps he purchased the term 'Vietnam,' thinking that when people read about that term, they would be interested in hearing about John McCain," says Peter Greenberger, head of elections and issue advocacy at Google. His job is to reach out to campaigns and encourage them to use search marketing tools like AdWords, a task he says is becoming easier as politicians of all stripes get more internet savvy.

Frenchman—who was so excited when Google first launched AdWords that he called them up that day to see how he could get involved—says it's important to buy words around issues that resonate with people, so that they will associate the candidate with what they're thinking about. The science is in figuring out the best way to match words to potential voters—and that's what Frenchman does all day, every day.

To help in this endeavor, Google allows ad buyers to "geotarget" where their ads will appear; that is, to specify that some ads only appear to users in a certain area of the country—say, a primary state. This way, says Greenberger, "your ad is only reaching those voters who you want to speak to." For example, "you could come to me as a campaign and say, I want to reach young mothers in Pennsylvania, even if they're not looking. We'll find the sites in our network that appeal to young mothers, and we'll geotarget so only young mothers in the state will see that ad." This is why Frenchman is constantly reevaluating his word database. While some words will run all the time, others will move in and out depending on the campaign's priorities. "There are thousands and thousands and thousands of words," he says. "Last week I added in another two thousand."

In terms of the bottom line, the ads are wildly successful. Frenchman gushes that the McCain campaign earns an estimated three or four dollars for every one that it spends on keywords. And that's the low estimate. So far, McCain has spent at least $200,000 on Frenchman's work, and the campaigns will likely spend that much and more as November's elections draw closer. And it's not too much to surmise that Obama and Clinton are cashing in on AdWords as well. Although neither campaign returned repeated requests for comment, their spending offers a clue to their priorities. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Obama has spent at least $400,000 on AdWords alone, and nearly $3.5 million on all his Internet media. By contrast, Clinton has spent only about $113,000 on Google ads; however, most of that money was spent in February, perhaps an indication that she is stepping up her online campaign. (Indeed, it's possible that both Clinton and Obama spend even more on this type of search marketing: If, like McCain, the campaigns use a consulting firm to handle their Internet strategy, records of the money paid to those firms would tell more of the story. Unfortunately, without comment from the campaigns, we can only speculate about further expenses.)

2008 is the first year that targeted Internet advertising has played such a significant role in national elections. While the 2004 race set the stage for online campaigning—with insurgent candidate Howard Dean pioneering the Internet candidacy—overall the candidates spent only about 1 percent of their advertising money on Internet media. By comparison, Obama spends at least 5 percent; McCain, 10 percent. "Senator Obama's presidential campaign has spent more in a week [on AdWords] than the total 2004 AdWords budgets for Kerry and Bush combined," says Greenberger. While the Internet is still largely the province of grassroots organizing rather than political machines, the shift toward keyword marketing reflects an increasingly sophisticated understanding of how Internet advertising can work. And it does work, says Greenberger, and on more than one level. "In 2004, the Internet was seen as a giant ATM machine. Now, you're seeing it used not only to raise money but also to persuade voters, and turn out voters." Greenberger followed up with the example of the Texas primary. "The Obama campaign purchased the terms 'early voting' and 'early voting locations.' They geotargeted the words, and after, the primary the campaign manager told me they turned out 20,000 new voters."

Determining which words will get the job done is a bit of a guessing game. The right words can reach thousands of people, while the wrong ones quickly lose money; after all, what good is a Google ad if nobody clicks on it? Frenchman estimates that he gives each new word a day or so to prove its worth before deleting it from the database and adding others. "You run into a game of relevancy with the search engines," he explains, citing the example of McCain's recent trip to Prescott, Arizona. Arizona's a big state, and people searching for general information about the Southwest probably aren't likely to click on a campaign ad. What's more, advertisers whose message is probably more relevant, like hotels or tour guides, will bid more for a click they're more likely to get. "If I bought the word 'cactus,' it would be hard to say that's relevant to the presidential campaign," says Frenchman. "'Prescott, Arizona' is probably about as broad as you would get." Still, there are exceptions—Vietnam, says Frenchman, being one of them. "'Vietnam' is a broad word, but it is so much intertwined with [McCain's] bio that it's very easy for me to have a relevant text ad." In other words, because his service in Vietnam is such a big part of McCain's identity as a candidate, Frenchman can gamble that searchers will understand the connection and make the click.

Frenchman says that he does not try to psychoanalyze voters, but to an extent, he's counting on our subliminal associations to promote McCain's message. So, is this guessing game the way of the future for online campaigning? "It remains to be seen," says Thomas Gensemer, managing director of Blue State Digital, the Democratic Internet consulting firm that grew out of the Dean campaign and is now doing work for Obama. In some ways, he says, what the candidates are doing is not so different from old-school direct mail, where campaigns would pay for the subscriber lists of magazines they thought would yield donors. "You assume different things of Readers' Digest versus Time magazine," he says. "But now, instead of a couple hundred subscribers, there are untold thousands. The potential is unlimited."

Photo used under a Creative Commons license from occhiovivo.

Casey Miner is an editorial fellow at Mother Jones.

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