Managing placements of online ads can be a challenge, as the Obama campaign recently learned. With more caucuses and primaries approaching, his campaign accidentally placed an ad for Nevada on a South Carolina TV news website. This seems to be an isolated incident. Fortunately, online ads can be swapped or pulled in ways that print ads cannot. The ad is no longer displayed on the News 14 website.
As you can see from the ad, it reminds voters to caucus for Obama on Saturday and includes a link to Obama's Nevada webpage.
Source: The Media Trust Company
Hi Eric, I agree with you that things like this are ultimately trivial and shouldn't be a "gotcha" against a campaign or against the general concept of online advertising. But that doesn't mean that it shouldn't be reported at all. At the very least, other campaigns should know that things like this can happen and be prepared when they do. In this case, Alan's piece was entirely factual and should cause no embarrassment to the campaign.
Colin Delany
e.politics
http://www.epolitics.com
I don't believe pointing out something that was obviously a minor mistake is news. It appears to me to be petty and looking to embarrass the campaign. I felt the same thing about the Romney campaign running on unwanted sites, but unfortunately because of his stand on that issue it was newsworthy for some.
Everyone has made minor mistakes in online advertising and the more media you buy the more mistakes you are going to make. We need to get past gotcha moments especially ones as trivial as this. This just fuels the flames that you can't trust online advertising.
What good can possibly come from this? There is NO learning to be gained from pointing out this minor event. Nothing.
I think the Obama campaign might have reason to quibble with that. Put yourself in their shoes. How do you go about finding out that your buy was errant - mistargeted or mislaunched, it makes no difference - when you only have five days from launch to the next important election date.
Do you think the network or the agency alerted the campaign to the mistakes, or was it left to the campaign to discover the error on its own?
Accountability is not a topic to shy away from, if we want to continue developing confidence in the interactive medium.
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We Need to Move Past Things Like This
Alan,
Why is this news? So the Obama campaign had an incorrectly geo-targeted ad run and it was corrected. Either they placed it wrong by mistake or the network made a mistake. Either way it was fixed.
We as an industry need to move past obvious mistakes that were corrected as quickly as possible. Post like this do nothing to help campaigns want to run online advertising. Pointing out that online ads can be fixed quicker than offline is not a significant selling point.
Eric Frenchman
Chief Internet Strategist
Connell Donatelli Inc.