Written By Noah Mallin | September 25, 2008 | Share This |

Liar

John McCain announced on Wednesday that he would be pulling all advertising and suspending his campaign while he hurries back to Washington to help “fix” the nation’s ailing economy. A number of observers have wondered why the campaign would have to be suspended and from the looks of McCain’s search advertising the candidate is wondering the same thing.

A quick glance at Google confirms that search ads are still running for terms surrounding both McCain’s and Palin’s names, placed by the McCain/Palin campaign. This jibes with other offline evidence that the campaign continues such as an appearance by McCain with Katie Couric last night (after apparently lying to David Letterman about “flying back to Washington” and not being able to make his scheduled Late Show appearance) and an airport rally for Sarah Palin today.

The difference may be in how one defines “campaigning.” McCain’s people describe the Palin event as an “arrival” rather than a rally and it may be that they don’t view paid search ads tied to the candidate names as political advertising (though this would be an unusual interpretation indeed.) What they have done is to pull down paid search ads based on most issue keywords or on their opponents’ names.

Still any observer would agree that an ad is an ad. The many brands that use their brand names as keywords in serach advertising will tell you that they don’t view them as any less of an ad. Granted they may be reaching different users than they would reach with a different set of keywords but they are still reaching someone. More to the point, suspending search advertising can be done very easily and in a matter of minutes, as can turning it back on again.

Hopefully this will help the McCain campaign define just what an ad is - unless of course they figured no-one will notice and are well aware of what they are doing. After all, if you aren’t worried about blowing off a guy with a major, national TV show…

Topics: Advertising: Online, Google, SEM: Ad Creative, SEM: Keyword Generation, SEM: Paid Search, Search: News |