Are you a John M(a)cCain or a (P)PC Guy?

Posted on June 12th, 2008 by Paul Woodhouse in Business Blogging, PPC, Paid Search
TAGS: google adwords, john mccain, peter greenberger, PPC, presidential campaign ppc

A few weeks ago, John McCain was asked if he was a Mac or a PC guy, to which he answered:

“Neither, I’m an illiterate that has to rely on my wife for all of the assistance I can get.”

Now as much as a luddite / technophobe / rickety old buffer John McCain might be, his campaign appears to have an online marketing team that’s worthy of praise from the head honcho at Google responsible for political search advertising, Peter Greenberger. In a recent Q&A Greenberger talks about the respective paid search campaigns of Senators Clinton, McCain and Obama, and has the following to say about the McCain AdWords strategy:

Q. It’s my understanding that the McCain campaign has been very dedicated to using search advertising throughout the election so far. Is that what you’ve seen?

A. Absolutely. The McCain campaign was the savviest among the Republican presidential primary campaigns. We think it’s not a coincidence that the two savviest primary campaigns with Google are the winning ones.

Even in the darkest days of the [McCain] campaign… they never stopped spending on Google AdWords… There were times, corresponding to the political polls, when maybe interest waned in his campaign, but he was ready to capture interest.

So there you go; you have a failing campaign where money’s too tight to mention but you still need to advertise. It’s imperative you get the best ROI imaginable, and a good PPC campaign is deemed one of the best ways to achieve that.

So credit where it’s due - while the old fella may not be able to turn a computer on, he has managed to assemble a team capable of running a half decent PPC campaign.

But McCain is of a very different age. In the following table that shows what internet users do according to their age he’d quite possibly be thrown in and amongst the ‘matures’ category:

I think it’s a fairly safe bet to assume Mr. McCain won’t be starting a personal campaign blog anytime soon if that table is anything to go by.