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Note: This post was co-authored by Kate Kaye of ClickZ.com

Several types of online communication have enjoyed break-out moments in U.S. political campaigning and public affairs, including e-mail (Jesse Ventura 1998), fundraising (McCain 2000), blogging (the Trent Lott resignation 2001), the organization of in-person meetings (MeetUp/Howard Dean 2003), and web videos (the “Macaca” incident, 2006).  After these successes received notice, adoption of the practices behind them spread among campaigners and activists.  They became standard equipment in the online politics toolkit.

Online advertising would seem a likely candidate for this social treatment.  As Henry Copeland and Megan Mitzel of Blogads.com point out, the interactivity, accountability, iterability, and targeting capacities of online ads –not to mention their relative low cost—make them an attractive complement to campaign advertising in print, broadcast, and cable media.   Yet despite steady growth in overall online advertising, at a rate of roughly 1% additional share of total advertising spending per year since the dawn of the millennium, and steady if not comparable growth in online political advertising expenditures at the presidential level, there has been no break-out moment of social discovery and adoption.

In this essay we examine the state of the craft of online political advertising in the 2004 and (2007 phase of the) 2008 presidential campaigns.  We contend that online political advertising remains in a prehistoric era.  It exists.  It is maturing in sophistication of strategy and message.  But it lacks a killer application and good public metrics.  To borrow an image and sound from one of the most famous scenes in film history, the ape has not tossed the bone into the air to the fanfare from “Also Sprach Zarathustra.”

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