US elections: Online playing its part, but ad spend short of expectations

Posted by: Thom James

It was widely assumed that one of the chief battlegrounds of the 2008 US Presidential elections would be online.

While various social media channels have provided fertile ground for debate and engagement with the political process, online ad spend itself has fallen well short of predictions, as reported by ClickZ. Media research firm Borrell Associates estimates that, of the $2.27 billion total spent on political advertising, less than 1 percent of that has gone towards online.

I’m curious to know what the breakdown is for election ad spend here in New Zealand, where Kiwis will go to the polls four days after the US, on 8 November. We’re seeing online channels (see TV One’s YouTube debate, Google’s ‘08 Election Gadget) play a much more prominent role than in the last general election in 2005, but banner advertising has been minimal, and parties don’t seem that savvy to the use of AdWords. Google ‘tax cuts’ or ‘education’, for example, and only Labour pops up in the sponsored links.

There are, of course, a myriad other ways of utilising online channels. But for all the talk of how the fractured media landscape has diminished the effectiveness of traditional above the line, it still seems that in the election campaigns here in New Zealand and in the US, parties are still putting their faith in traditional advertising over online.