The 2012 tech primary
By: Kim Hart
January 16, 2012 04:30 AM EST

As GOP presidential contenders stump for votes from Iowa to New Hampshire to South Carolina, Google, Facebook and Twitter are in a race of their own — for millions of dollars in political ads.

The tech giants are offering candidates new ways to advertise — Mitt Romney has spots on YouTube and Rick Perry’s Facebook ads target Christian college kids in South Carolina — and hiring political consultants, sponsoring debates and poaching from each other’s ad sales teams to jockey for the top spot in political social media circles.

“This is the Twitter election,” boasted Peter Greenberger, who Twitter recently lured away from Google, where he started the search giant’s political ad sales team in 2007. “We’ll be a core component.”

Not so fast, says Google, the most experienced Web company when it comes to political advertising. Google has expanded its team to work directly with campaigns to come up with ad strategies and every Republican presidential candidate has already bought in, and several have also bought newly refined YouTube ads that target viewers in specific states or cities.

“What we saw in Iowa and New Hampshire was campaigns using search ads to recruit volunteers and get out the vote,” said Rob Saliterman, who heads Google’s political ad sales on the Republican side. “They’re reaching people at the exact moment where someone has expressed interest in the campaign.”

In 2008 and 2010, candidates largely used Google ads to fundraise. Now, in a sign of new sophistication, candidates are using the ads to persuade voters. For example, they’ve begun to run search ads on each other’s names. In Iowa, a Google search for Rick Santorum would bring up a critical ad paid for by Perry’s campaign. When New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie endorsed Romney, his campaign bought ads to pop up when voters searched for Christie.

Google also owns YouTube, the Web’s biggest online video network, where candidates frequently post short ad spots and commercials. New for this election, YouTube offers a “TrueView” feature that tracks how long viewers watch a video ad, so campaigns only pay when a viewer watches most of the ad.

Then there’s Facebook, which also has practice when it comes to working with politicians, though its user base was smaller for previous elections. The social networking behemoth allows campaigns to target voters of a specific demographic with specific interests because users volunteer their personal information.

In Iowa, for example, Perry’s campaign marketed his faith-focused commercials to Iowans who identified themselves as Christians on Facebook. The campaign also made sure a spot featuring his wife, Anita Perry, was prominent on the pages of conservative women in the state.

Last week, Perry’s campaign launched a new ad targeting students at Furman University, a Baptist college in South Carolina, according to Vincent Harris of Harris Media, who manages Perry’s digital strategy.

Twitter, already central to the national political conversation, is a newcomer to the political ad arena. In September, it launched its first political product aiming to get a cut of the lucrative 2012 ad spend.

A candidate can buy a “promoted tweet,” which will appear when a certain term is searched for as well as in the timelines of campaign followers, and have a small logo and disclaimer. Twitter also offers a “promoted account” to help boost the number of followers and a “promoted trend,” which will put a campaign ad atop popular lists of trending topics.

The tech contest to be the wired candidate’s answer to the TV buy has caught the attention of campaign strategists.

“They’re each trying to have the value add of being the fastest-moving vertical,” said Zac Moffatt, digital strategist for the Romney campaign.

“When I started doing this three years ago, Google had two people, Facebook had no one and Twitter didn’t have advertising at all. Now I’m watching them all expand.”

Television ads will continue to attract the bulk of campaign advertising spending in 2012, strategists say. But they predict social media will play a larger role this year — in both national and state contests — because growing numbers of voters are getting their news online rather than from TV. In the 2010 elections, 73 percent of adult Internet users went online to get information about the elections or to get involved in a campaign, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

While it’s not the first election cycle in which campaigns have tried to engage voters online, “it will be a seismic shift in terms of the amount of budgets these mediums are getting,” said Josh Koster, Managing Partner of Chong + Koster, a digital media firm. Google and Facebook will probably get larger pieces of the budget pie, he said, since Twitter has a more limited number of ad products.

To capitalize on their growing political roles, the companies are also trying to increase their visibility on the campaign trail. Google and Facebook have already sponsored GOP debates, and Google is sponsoring media hangouts at the primary caucuses.

Not everyone thinks Google, Facebook and Twitter need to compete to attract campaigns.

“They all have large audiences, so it’s in the best interest of the campaigns to be on all the platforms,” said Alan Rosenblatt, associate director of online advocacy for the Center for American Progress, a progressive think tank. “Is there a competition between ABC and NBC to get political ads? I don’t think so. They’re all going to get political ads.”

That’s not stopping the companies from hiring top digital and political strategists to drive their efforts.

Saliterman, who held several communications jobs in the George W. Bush administration, joined Google in September to leverage his contacts with Republicans. Andrew Roos, former Democratic campaign manager, handles sales to Democrats, and a new hire, Sean Harrison, is in charge of selling ads to super PACs and independent-expenditure groups.

To get ready for 2012, Facebook hired Katie Harbath, former chief digital strategist for the National Republican Senatorial Committee who also worked on Rudy Giuliani’s presidential campaign and the Republican National Committee, to reach out to Republican candidates. Adam Conner, a longtime Facebook staffer in D.C., handles relationships with Democrats.

In addition to Greenberger, Twitter hired Mindy Finn, one of the Republican Party’s top digital strategists and founder of consulting firm EngageDC.

One of Twitter’s big advantages: Its users are ultra-engaged in politics.

That’s already paying dividends for campaigns. For corporate advertisers, between 1 percent and 3 percent of Twitter users will engage with a Promoted Tweet by clicking, retweeting, replying to or marking it as a favorite. But with political Promoted Tweets, that number is as high as 20 percent, Greenberger said.

Another advantage: Twitter allows campaigns to immediately push a message to followers during a debate, after a TV interview or to respond to a rival’s attack.

Facebook’s huge user base tends to stay on the site for long periods of time, creating a captive audience for political messaging with a social bent.

For example, Newt Gingrich’s campaign has created an application that shows which of a user’s friends are making phone calls for the candidate.

Santorum posts video clips to his page, counting on his “fans” to share them with their own friends. Supporters of Ron Paul often share his status updates and messages.

“What’s really different this cycle is that we’re seeing campaigns start to add a social element into everything they do,” Facebook’s Harbath said.

That’s a departure from previous cycles, when more emphasis was placed on how many people clicked the “Like” button on a candidate’s page.

Social media companies aren’t the only Web platforms campaigns are leveraging this year. Internet radio site Pandora is also getting some advertising dollars, as are popular video sites such as Hulu.com and search engines like Microsoft’s Bing.

But the biggest slice of the online ad budget is going to the “Big Three,” as several strategists have dubbed Google, Facebook and Twitter.

Some presidential campaigns will be spending upward of 10 percent of their advertising budgets on digital ad buys — a significant increase from previous election cycles, predicted Eric Frenchman of Campaign Solutions, who managed Michele Bachmann’s digital efforts before she dropped out of the race.

Particularly in the early primary states, “TV media has probably been bought up, so you can have a much more significant impact if you go mostly digital at this point,” Frenchman said.

Romney, for example, bought up a significant amount of ads on YouTube videos heading into Iowa and New Hampshire, and is doing the same for South Carolina.

Despite the competitive pitches, there is one area where Google, Facebook and Twitter agree: Campaigns should be investing a lot more money online.

“Voters are spending a lot more time online and the ad dollars are not matching that,” Greenberger said. He said he expects the average congressional campaigns to spend only about 5 percent of their advertising budgets on digital media. Presidential campaigns may spend closer to 10 percent.

Campaigns are already showing signs of becoming bigger spenders in the online space. Harris, Perry’s digital adviser, said he’s recommending that campaigns spend at least one-third of their ad buys on Facebook alone. Moffatt, of Romney’s campaign, expects the campaign to spend “no less than 10 percent” on online plays.

“It’s so much more competitive this time around” between the social media sites, said Michael Beach, co-founder of Targeted Victory, a Republican digital strategy consulting firm. “Next fall, there’s going to be a lot of money going into everything. Right now, when resources are more scarce, they’re all competing for the first dollar.”