At last week's New Organizing Institute/IPDI-sponsored Google presentation on advocacy tools, after looking at Google Ads and answering questions about click fraud, the company's Elections and Issue Advocacy team touched on a new tool whose potential political significance jumped out at me. More than a year ago, Google snapped up a company that was developing an online interface for buying radio advertising, and despite some skepticism about its usefulness, the product looks to be moving out of beta fairly soon.

You can get a good overview of how the ordering system will work here; note that you can specify stations by location and genre, set your own budget, choose your time of day to run ads and get some reporting after-the-fact. You upload your own ads as mp3s, though the site will help you find a company to build them if necessary. Groovy! Basically, you can run ads across the country from a single interface — you won't need to work with different ad reps for individual stations or chains of stations. With 1600 AM and FM stations in the network, and the top 10 stations in 24 of the 25 biggest media markets in the country, Google claims the potential to reach essentially 100% of the U.S. population.

The Web on the Candidates

TechPresident blogger David All has started a new blog, TechRepublican.com (nice name David!) that wants to get the Republican establishment to embrace Web 2.0 strategies. "While the Internet has grown rapidly, the Party apparatus and its top officials are operating in a disconnected, Web 0.5 world. The result is that our message is failing to penetrate the modern world where millions of independent voters and modern Republicans spend a majority of their time," All writes. All and friends want to galvanize "Gen Nexters" (ooh, that term hurts) to "think, discuss, read, collaborate, criticize, share, and act to make a difference" in the Republican Party, and to usher the party into the 21st century. It's big project that will benefit from David's bottomless well of energy. We wish him luck. Also check out DomeNation, a weekly show on YouTube with David and Jerome Armstrong which will focus on politics and technology.

Following up on his analysis of who's buying Google text ads for Democratic candidates, Steve Patterson of the Bivings Report takes a look at who's buying ads for the Republicans. In addition to gear from Zazzle.com, several of the candidates are buying ads under others' names. For example, Rudy Giuliani is buying ads for searches for himself, Sam Brownback, Mike Huckabee, and John McCain, and only Giuliani and McCain are taking out ads against their own sites.