Fire Your Media Planner

I understand that the process of buying online advertising is not as simple as dialing up BuzzFeed or the Huffington Post and asking for a rate card. As far as I can gather, advertisers go through middlemen, utilizing third-party vendors that distribute ads over a range of sites. Call it buying in bulk. But even if an advertiser is more specific in its request than just “high traffic sites” or “entertainment media,” it might be wise to narrow the field a little further than “political websites.” Precise targeting is obviously possible; National Review is lousy with ads for books by its contributors, like Mark Steyn’s “After America.” (Two guesses which Muslim socialist will be ushering in the apocalypse.) Left-wing magazine Mother Jones features an interactive spot from Change.org that cycles through petitions about abortion rights and saving the wolves. Newsmax, a sort of poor man’s Fox News, caters to its low-information voters by spotlighting links like “A 30-second daily trick that SHRINKS your belly” and “Eat this and the fat pours out of you!” (See this hilarious Baffler article about the marriage of convenience between conservative websites and snake oil salesmen like gold-bullion scammers and fake Viagra peddlers.)

You get what you pay for, though, and low-budget outfits unwilling to pay for specificity end up paying in another way: wasted ad dollars. Case in point:

Note the dramatic call to “Stop the Islamist Witch Hunt against Rep. Bachmann” from the David Horowitz Freedom Center, a conservative foundation that runs illustrious programs like “Jihad Watch” and generally spreads Islamophobic, shariah-law-is-nigh vitriol. It’s an ad that would fit right in at National Review, but what is it doing on the home page of the liberal Washington Monthly, a magazine that splashes photos of a smiling President Obama on its cover beneath the headline “Barack the Builder”? Much has been written about the “digital divide” between Republicans and Democrats; last November’s failure of the Romney campaign’s “ORCA” get-out-the-vote technology was only the latest evidence that the GOP is outmatched in Internet know-how. But now it seems conservative groups in general could use a primer on online advertising. If the Obama campaign can use its massive e-mail list to send alerts about legitimate-rape craziness to 25-year-old female Facebookers in Iowa and Amazon.com can serve a Travelocity ad to someone who just searched for suitcases and bug spray, the media-savvy world of folks like Eric Erickson and Matt Drudge can surely learn to pick better platforms for its ads.

Newsmax: Targeting done right, if crazily.

The mismatch is not as bad as the recurrent print-media gaffe of running inappropriate ads alongside serious articles, like the recent gun show promotion that a Connecticut paper paired with a story on the Newtown shooting. It is, however, perhaps an even bigger waste of money. (Hey, even gun owners need their morning news.) The only clicks the Bachmann ad is likely to garner are from bemused liberals cackling in amazement. The Washington Monthly is a pretty low-profile publication, and its readers are ideologically homogeneous. It doesn’t attract the conservative trolls who lurk at places like The Nation and Mother Jones solely to post inflammatory remarks in the comments threads. (Grammatically challenged sample from The Nation: “The USS Progressive will start taking on water and slowly sink and the free riders will abandon ship and the progressive movement will again find itself as the permanent minority they have always been and will be.”)

For the record, this is what Ed Kilgore, the Monthly’s prolific blogger-in-residence, and his predecessor, Steve Benen, have to say about the woman (a.k.a. “the unhinged Minnesotan” or “that uber-wingnut congresswoman”) the Freedom Center wants us to support:

Even as the Republican Party leaps off a right-wing cliff, Bachmann stands out for her unique brand of madness.

Bachmann’s principal problem is that she combines the worst of two important traits: she’s strikingly ignorant about public policy and she’s paranoid to the point of delusion.

The problem isn’t that she’s a liar. The problem is Bachmann combines two very serious flaws: she’s mad as a hatter and conspicuously unintelligent.

Bachmann’s ignorance knows no bounds. The enduring question about Republicans’ unhinged rhetoric is whether the speaker is lying or crazy. With Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), it’s especially challenging, but I tend to go with the latter — she strikes me as entirely sincere and stark raving mad. Her accusations are truly idiotic, but I don’t doubt that Bachmann actually believes them.

To top it off, under the headline “Bachmann: Too Crazy for the GOP?” Kilgore knocks both the congresswoman and the anti-Muslim rhetoric that organizations like the David Horowitz Freedom Center employ:

Bachmann has been “out there” for years, making outrageous statements almost daily and embodying a brand of Christian Nationalism that is never more than a few steps away from hate-group ravings.

Are you feeling the love yet?

Apparently, the media buyer for over-the-top right-wing outfits is working overtime, because the latest ad to pop up on the Monthly’s website is an even worse fit:

Click the link and you’re taken to the website of the Public Advocate of the United States, an obscure group which “lobbies to fight the radical agenda of the Homosexual Lobby.” It calls for signatures on a “Protect Our Children’s Innocence Petition” that warns of a wave of mandated homosexual indoctrination in our public schools: “This bill is the brainchild of radical liberals who want to force their political view-points on to our children and to eradicate the values you and I cherish.” (Is the English language really so difficult? Beware “legislation working it’s way through the United States Congress.”)

Yeah, that’s going to get a lot of buy-in from WaMo readers.

And the icing on the cake? Three minutes ago, as I scrolled through the search results for “Michele Bachmann” on the magazine’s website, this graced my screen:

Sign up today? Toss in an AdBlock plug-in for Firefox and you’ve got yourself a deal.

Highlights (Lowlights?) from the GOP Debate

The three best moments from tonight’s Republican debate in Nevada:

1. Defending his “9-9-9” plan from criticism that it would add a 9 percent value-added tax on top of existing state sales taxes, Herman Cain said: “This is an example of mixing apples and oranges. The state tax is an apple. We are replacing the current tax code with oranges. So it’s not correct to mix apples and oranges.”

State taxes are apples, federal taxes are oranges, but you have to pay both in dollars.

2. Michele Bachmann warned that Cain’s plan would just give the government another revenue stream: “One thing I know about Congress, being a member of Congress for five years, is that any time you give the Congress a brand-new tax, it doesn’t go away. When we got the income tax in 1913, the top rate was 7 percent. By 1980, the top rate was 70 percent.

By 2011, the top rate was 35 percent. Wait, is 35 less than 70?

3. Bachmann, discussing foreign policy, said, “Anderson, now with the president, he put us in Libya. He is now putting us in Africa. We already were stretched too thin, and he put our Special Operations Forces in Africa.”

Libya is in Africa.

 

Also, an honorable mention for “Most Inexplicable Moment.”

At the end of the debate, as moderator Anderson Cooper was wrapping things up, Michele Bachmann pronounced, “Anderson, the good news is, the cake is baked. Barack Obama will be a one-term president; there’s no question about that.”

Yes, but the question is, what about the cookies? The cupcakes? Hell, what about the all-American apple pie? Ms. Bachmann, please — enlighten us as to how your presidency will promote diversity in baked goods.

 

For what it’s worth, I think Mitt Romney wiped the floor with the other candidates tonight. Unfortunately, Romney’s probably not looking for a thumbs-up from a liberal like me. Maybe he should be worried after all.

Vote for Sanity in 2016

(photo via The Atlantic)

Since Jon Huntsman made the anti-EPA remarks that inspired my last ramble on his political future, the candidate has pivoted sharply toward the center, dismissing fellow 2012 contenders Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann as “unelectable.” While one of the first comments on the Times’ Caucus blog was something to the effect of “It takes one to know one,” Huntsman seems to have realized that trying to out-crazy the crazies is not a viable strategy. A former governor who supports civil unions and calls Perry’s skepticism about global warming “a serious problem” is not going to win over any Bachmann-ites or Palin-boosters. Though Huntsman takes pains to point out that he is still a conservative — the WSJ notes that he no longer advocates capping greenhouse gases or fighting climate change “as long as unemployment remains high” — he added to his Twitter following on Friday when he remarked that, “To be clear, I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy.”

Is this is a good move for Huntsman? I maintained in my last post that moving to the right would do little to strengthen his appeal to Tea Partiers, while simultaneously alienating the moderates he will need to depend on for a 2016 run (or, for that matter, a 2012 general election). At the National Journal, Ben Terris writes that “While the move is sure to differentiate Huntsman from the crowd, it remains to be seen whether it will also be an act of political suicide.” Terris has a point: no matter how much attention Huntsman draws from his noisy shift to the center, it won’t help him in a primary season that has seen Michele Bachmann top the Iowa Straw Poll. Indeed, Politico is reporting that the Democratic National Committee has gleefully latched onto Huntsman’s recent remarks, inserting them into an e-mail to reporters. This belies the theory that there is no such thing as bad P.R., as receiving the seal of approval from the DNC is about as helpful as Obama’s sly, repeated references to Huntsman as “my good friend.”

Still, Huntsman doubled down on his radical-centrist strategy on Sunday, declaring on ABC News’s This Week that “this country is crying out for a sensible middle ground,” not “people on the fringes” with “zero substance.” At the Times, Brian Knowlton writes that such comments “suggested that he might have learned a lesson from a fellow Republican whose campaign bore some similarities to his own: Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota.” Pawlenty, “another former two-term governor with a record as a relatively mainstream conservative,” was criticized for “[coming] across as too soft-spoken and moderate in a year of unusually heated partisan passions.” Where Huntsman presumably hopes to improve on Pawlenty, however, is in the conflation of “moderate” and “soft-spoken.” As far as I can tell, the former governor of Utah wants to prove that mainstream sanity can be just as passionate and conviction-filled as Michele Bachmann’s born-again faith or Rick Perry’s criminalization of the Fed. He’s pinning his chance on the theory that home-schooling and secession aren’t the only things that get crowds riled up. It remains to be seen, however, whether cries to find “practical, common-sense solutions” and end America’s “heroin-like dependence” on foreign oil will be as attractive to voters as the red-meat exhortations Tea Party adherents have come to expect.

None of this is to say that Huntsman is turning into someone who independents will automatically love. His positions are still very much to the right of the many swing voters who were crucial to Obama’s win in 2008 and who increasingly appear to be up for grabs in 2012. The Wall Street Journal writes that he “supports repealing President Barack Obama’s health-care law and turning Medicaid into block grants to the states,” and while what the Journal refers to as “ObamaCare” does not poll well among independents, other parts of Huntsman’s platform are less palatable. He wants to roll back the Wall Street reforms of Dodd-Frank, despite continued Main Street disgust with overpaid bankers and an economy teetering on the brink of another recession. He “opposes another round of federal funding for infrastructure,” when even Bill Gross, the Republican who heads the enormous bond fund Pimco, is advocating for direct hiring by the federal government. If Huntsman is indeed positioning himself for a 2016 run, his foray into the 2012 primaries still has the potential to unearth some landmines.

At The Atlantic, James Fallows took one look at Huntsman’s global-warming Tweet and proclaimed “At Last There’s Proof: Jon Huntsman Is Aiming for 2016.” I can see where Fallows is coming from; it’s indeed evident that Huntsman’s “views are going nowhere with the Republican primary electorate this time around.” In my last post, I wondered whether, by falling into line at the Iowa debate and refusing a hypothetical budget deal that favors spending cuts over taxes by a 10-to-1 ratio, Huntsman risked making himself unelectable in 2016. But now that he has begun to tack more aggressively toward the center, I can discern the outlines of a master plan. Whether Huntsman intended all along to use his 2012 bid as a way to keep his name in the press, or whether he moved the goalpost to 2016 only after realizing the hopelessness of the current field, he seems to have acknowledged the benefit of a reputation for reality-based thinking. If he makes an impression as a sane, qualified contender this time around, 2016 may be for him what 2008 was for John McCain and what 2012 may be for Mitt Romney. After all, America loves a comeback, and one needs only look to post-presidency Bill Clinton or post-OxyContin Rush Limbaugh to know that this is truly the country of second chances.

The WSJ observes that his “low-key, Mr. Mellow approach to the Republican presidential campaign has gotten him high praise in elite media circles – from a spread in Vogue to the New York Times Magazine cover – but little traction among Republican voters who actually do the choosing.” In fact, attention from the “elite media” tends to have an inverse relationship to traction among Republicans ; more of the former invariably results in less of the latter. It’s not for nothing that Sarah Palin, on her latest bus tour, tried her hardest to give the slip to the “lamestream media.” Vogue’s readers may not be voting in the Republican primaries (though, I should point out, neither will many of the Newsweek readers who were treated to the magazine’s creepy, soft-porn photos of a hoodie’d Palin lounging dockside), but Huntsman knows that they may well be voting in November 2016.