Electile Dysfunction: NAA's Misfire

Electile Dysfunction. I have to give proper credit for that term to The Black Sheep sandwich shop in Amherst.

Lots of dysfunction to report of course, but I liked the one posted by Kate Kaye on ClickZ today:

Anyway, a small ad caught my eye on the homepage of Campaigns & Elections Magazine. It's a Newspaper Association of America ad, touting paper sites as a good place to reach voters.

OK, so far, so good.

The thing is, the NAA is totally missing the point from there. The ad links to a brochure-ware style landing page with blurbs about how the trade group is helping newspapers reach out to political consultants and media buyers.

The post points out that NAA is targeting a good market -- those who run campaigns and spend ad dollars -- with its ad on the Campaign and Elections website, but that when you click through the content reads like it is directed at newspaper publishers, not campaign ad buyers. Confusion in message and in targeting.

Good points. I'd add that the campaign pushes print, print, print and notes the competition for ad dollars is "broadcast." Yes, but there is something called the Internet and its use by politicos was well-covered, indeed by newspapers in the '06 go-round.

In fact, in the '06 election My Space became the New Iowa. Remember George Allen's Macaca Moment and how Jon Tester staffer Andy Tweeten caught incumbent Montana Senator Conrad Burns looking like a mid-20th century relic , both on YouTube. Recall all the stories on John McCain and Mark Warner also using the video channel to create an image. Think about what Slate started doing in re-mixing campaign ads.

And look no farther than newspaper websites, which began using social networking to enable interactive campaign presences online.

The Austin American-Statesman was one that put together a new program. It used its blog-creating community software, powered by Pluck (which deserves tech credit for USAToday.com social networking launch), to build out – and promote – a special candidates area.

Clearly, the future of politics and political advertising is online, more than it is is print, and you'd think NAA would recognize this. Look at this way: you can sell unlimited space and price what the market will bear. You can both re-establish a newspaper company's essentiality going forward and create new revenue streams. Candidate blogs. Community forums. Video. Audio. Interviews. All kinds of stuff.

Luckily, it's just '07, but now's the time for NAA and the industry to look at its own coverage, its own fledgling experiments, like Austin's, and get its own political message right.