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“President” Obama Beats McCain in Online Advertising Battle

By Andrew Redfern @ 5th September 2008 2:29 am

comScore, Inc. (Nasdaq: SCOR) today released its updates study on the online performance of the campaigns for Senator Barack Obama and Senator John McCain in their quests to be American president.

The study, which evaluated site visitation, video viewing behavior, searches on the candidates’ names, and display advertising efforts across the Web, showed that Barack Obama’s campaign ran a more advanced online operation during the first six months of 2008. Obama leads McCain in site visitors, candidate searches, and display ads, while the McCain campaign leads only in video views.

During the first half of 2008, the Obama campaign consistently displayed more online ads than the McCain campaign, averaging nearly 92 million exposures per month compared to approximately 7 million per month for McCain. In recent months, Obama’s online efforts have ramped up considerably with 150 million exposures in May and 244 million in June.

“Not only have the two campaigns placed a different level of emphasis on the importance of using online advertising as part of the media mix, but their execution also shows stark differences,” said Andrew Lipsman, senior analyst at comScore. “While Obama’s ads tend to be ‘brand-building’ ads encouraging people to join the movement, McCain’s ads are often issue-oriented. Additionally, while Obama ads have an almost universally positive message, McCain ads feature a mix of positive and negative messages.”

Although BarackObama.com has attracted nearly four times the average number of monthly visitors (2.2 million) as JohnMcCain.com (583,000), the McCain site has generated more than three times as many video views (2.1 million vs. 612,000).

Monthly Average (Jan 2008 – Jun 2008)
Candidate Site                      Unique Visitors (000)     Videos (000)
BarackObama.com                          2,178                    612
JohnMcCain.com                             583                  2,101

“By featuring video content prominently on the front page of JohnMcCain.com, the campaign has been able to effectively leverage the Web to reach a larger audience with its video campaign messages,” added Mr. Lipsman.

Meanwhile, the number of searches including the term “Obama” was approximately four times that of “McCain” (5.4 million vs. 1.3 million).

This disparity likely reflects both the public’s interest in Barack Obama’s historic candidacy as the first African-American presidential nominee from a major political party and the desire to find out more about the background and positions of this relative newcomer on the national political stage.

Average Monthly
Search Term                         Searches (000)
“Obama”                                 5,362
“McCain”                                1,345

* Based on broad matches of the terms “Obama” and “McCain” on the 5 major U.S. search engines

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