John McCain Forgot to Spend Money on That Internet Thingy
John McCain had a lot of things going against him in his failed presidential bid, but trumping them all was the fact that he was an old, old man.
And if there's one thing that old men don't understand, it's the Internet. Just ask soon-to-be-ex-Senator Ted Stevens. He's counting on that "series of tubes" to lead to a tunnel out of the federal prison he's headed to!
Anyway, McCain's complete lack of understanding about the Internet led him to vastly deprioritize spending his campaign funds there. In the end, it turns out that he spent less than 1/5 of what the Obama campaign did online…
As John McCain's interactive campaign is called disorganized and disconnected by some Monday morning quarterbacks, one thing's for sure. The Republican hopeful's Web team spent far less on online advertising than the Obama camp.
The McCain campaign spent just over $1.5 million on Web media, according to data representing campaign 2008 expenditures into September. Obama's campaign spent around $8 million in '08 as of October.
Well, I guess that might have some correlation with the fact that McCain won a miserable 32% of the youth vote in the election.
But really, this second-guessing is unfair. In actuality, McCain spent his campaign funds on plenty of cutting-edge media besides the Internet, such as: AM radio, sandwich boards, and those planes that trail banners behind them.
RSS
Some of us youth did not vote for McCain because of his lack of integrity and stupid policies. One more banner ad wouldn't change who he is.
I will agree that Obama used the internet far better than McCain did and I'll believe that Obama out spent McCain 5 to 1 on internet advertising. However, I'm guessing that Obama also outspent McCain 5 to 1 on everything else.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSRJvq4Wd48
If he told me the internet was a series of tubular bells, I would consider him for a cabinet post.
And the man in the rain picked up his bag of secrets, and journeyed up the mountainside, far above the clouds, and nothing was ever heard from him again, except for the sound of Tubular Bells.
So RIGHT. I am one of those "old people" too but I am smart enough to listen to "young people", my adult children who got me on the net, twitter, facebook, blogs etc etc. I then got my 86 year old father in law on Twitter. Obviously McCain didn't tap into the family resource. I guess he just wants to be "old".