Online Campaign Ads Come Into Their Own: Web Advertising Is Becoming More Important Than Ever For Candidates Hoping To Reach Voters, National Journal.

Q: I just got the latest numbers from Nielsen Online about who is buying more impressions, Obama or McCain. According to them, Obama bought 1.15 million impressions in June, and McCain bought many more impressions across sponsored search networks. He bought 7 million total. Why do you think that disparity exists between the two campaigns, that one is spending so much more on sponsored search?

Greenberger: I would encourage you to speak with either of those campaigns... but to answer it with a generality... it really depends on the strategies of the campaigns. The online strategies today correspond directly to the more general strategy that the campaigns are engaged in.

Early in the cycle, campaigns were interested in gathering e-mail addresses and raising money from the base. You saw a lot of that sort of direct-response search advertising trying to sign people up to build your donor lists.

In this stage, you are seeing more of an effort at persuasion. Everybody knows there is a certain sliver... of the electorate that is undecided and that is looking for more information. Here is where I think you might see the campaigns interested in more impressions and maybe in more display advertising as opposed to search, because you are not looking for that active voter who maybe knows who he or she is voting for. But you are looking for more of that passive voter who is reading information but not quite ready to commit. And so I think you will see more display advertising based on that.

Digg Bury Brigade: 28 negative McCain stories buried in 30 days, LA Times.

A close look at campaign-oriented stories on Digg shows that, in the last 30 days, at least 28 stories critical of GOP Sen. John McCain have been mysteriously "buried" — meaning enough Digg users have voted against a story that the submission may no longer appear on the site's high-traffic front page.

Only about five Barack Obama-related stories (positive and negative) were buried in the same period.

According to Digg's search results, 10 of the 28 McCain stories were zapped after they had already graduated to the front page, including several that had received more than 700 diggs.

Text the Vote, NY Times.

For Mr. Obama, who is building his campaign around bringing in new young voters and registering minority voters, there’s no more effective outreach than a text message. Cellphones, which legally can’t be called by pollsters and can’t be reached by campaign “robo-calls,” are the most intimate form of communication technology today. Young voters of every race are more likely to use their cellphones and, in many cases, don’t even have landline service. (About one in three people between the ages of 18 and 29 doesn’t have a landline.)

The Obama campaign has been aggressively using text messaging since the earliest of this year’s primaries and caucuses. On the day of the Iowa caucuses, the campaign sent repeated messages and caucus tips to the cellphones of its Iowa supporters. In New Hampshire, Mr. Obama sent his supporters three text messages over the course of primary day to remind them to vote and to get their friends to vote. There, Mr. Obama won the 18-to-24-year-old bracket by nearly 40 points, the largest split of any age bracket.