Ethics and marketing is always an interesting question, especially when it comes to bidding on competitors keywords. In politics there seems to be whole new rules being created and a new question being raised about bidding for your opponents name. It seems that the Romney campaign is trying to get in on the Obama craze. Marty Weintraub of aimClear noted this this week that the Romney Campaign was buying advertising using keywords for Obama. He questioned if this was smart marketing, or just plain dirty tactics – that even typing in “Bara” was getting ads for Romney.
From AimClear Blog
Not to be bested by having Romney on top, it seems that the Obama campaign has also decided to buy ads using its own keywords. Seems that sometime after Marty noticed the issue, someone in their campaign also noticed and they thought it was detrimental enough to take action. I also noticed that a lot more people “like” Obama on Facebook than Romney, but it could be because because Obama was been in the spotlight a lot longer.
The Obama campaign isn’t doing the same, but interestingly enough when you type in Romney, you do get ads for Paul Ryan VP. I’m not sure the reason for that, perhaps they thought that more people needed to know more about Paul Ryan?
The Romney campaign seems to also be buying other keywords, including President, making them right above President Bill Clinton, and far above President Mahmoud Abbas. No mention of Obama, which is curious indeed.
