I was reading a feed on the financial crisis and the need for US to maintain world confidence… And right below the feed was an advertisement for LK Advani as PM?
Now this is new! A little researching showed that he threw his online campaign open by launching his website and blog on Novermber 08. What I noticed is the heavy use of Google AdSense network by him and words like fundraising, economy, economic confidence are being used by him. Infact, in a matter of minutes, I spotted him on atleasts 3 of my regular feeds (Indian Stock Research (word-economy), Tech feed (word-fundraiser) and business (word-economic confidence).
What’s interesting is that these ads don’t feature the “Ads by Google” text though they are being shown by Google. I think this oversight by Google is a heavy mistake.
I believe Google opened a dedicated political ad sales office, with 25 staffers, in Washington DC sometime in Jan this year.
“You can geotarget as finely as a zip code, so almost to within a mile or so radius of where the voter is. If you want to reach a voter in New Hampshire it means you’re not wasting media spend on users in Vermont who can’t vote. Refine it even more if you just want to reach women by running on sites like MarthaStewart.com,” said Peter Greenberger, head of elections and issue advocacy at Google’s Washington office.
I wonder if Google has any such advocacy group in India? And also think that Google should not allow its adwords & adsense technology for use for any political campaigning in India.
update Feb 04, 09: A few other words taken up by him…”bad to worse”, “vision”, “United States”, “blog”,”case”,”founder”,”justice”,”prospect”. BTW, I started noticing his add’s on a lot of articles on ‘twitter’. More on this later
