From Web Pro News comes an interesting story about the Drum Major Institute (DMI), a self-described “non-partisan,” left-leaning policy organization; they bought every member of the New York State Legislature…as keywords in an AdWords campaign. For the next thirty days, New Yorkers Googling their state representatives will see paid listings grading the lawmakers on their middle class voting records.

With a fed-up tone and a “gotcha!” attitude, the DMI’s blog further explains its campaign under the heading, “Google this, Albany.” They identify a number of bills that came before the State Assembly and/or Senate from 2001-2005 that were important to “strengthening and expanding our state’s middle class,” and rate lawmakers’ votes against what DMI says was the pro-middle class position. They say their grades should turn up for Google searches and GMail discussions of legislators. Since Reprise Media calls New York home, we decided to look up the representatives for our lower Manhattan districts. Sure enough, Google returned top sponsored listings for Senator Martin Connor (“Connor Earns a “C” Grade) and Assemblywoman Deborah Glick (“Glick Earns an A- Grade”).

Without getting into the politics of the campaign, a few cursory searches reveal that DMI could probably have done a better job nailing down their keywords. While Googling “deborah glick” turned up DMI’s paid listing, a search for “Deborah J. Glick” – which is how her name appears on her website and even in DMI’s report card – yields no paid listing of any kind. And a straight search for Brooklyn Senator “Velmanette Montgomery” strangely returns no paid listings, either, although a search for “new york senator montgomery” gives up the DMI’s grade (it’s a “B”). And we tried to get listings to turn up in GMails mentioning Senator Joe Bruno, but couldn’t – we did, however, see one ad about Bruno being “honored during chamber event.”

DMI touted the blog-friendliness of their report card spreadsheet, which can be downloaded and rearranged by any of the report’s criteria. But Joe New Yorker, surfing in from their paid listing wanting to know why Martin Connor is getting a “C,” could get frustrated. There are no separate landing pages for each legislator; all the paid listings lead to the patriotic but somewhat inscrutable front page for DMI’s scorecard. You’ve got to hunt for the chart showing why your rep got the grade they did, and those are organized by the number of the legislative district, instead of handier info like, say, the lawmaker’s name.

And the blowback could get ugly; hell hath no fury like a fat cat poorly graded by a think tank. Says John Battelle, “The next step, of course, will be those legislators who got terrible grades fighting back with their own AdWord campaigns.” And those campaigns could be very effective if they’re just slightly better organized -and longer-lasting – than DMI’s. This is a bold, creative move for a non-profit political group, but they left targeted politicos with an awful lot of room to maneuver.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 16th, 2006 at 3:02 pm and is filed under Featured Item, Google: AdWords. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.