Google Sponsored Ads Reveal McCain VP Pick?

slfisher 0 477 Views

Why prebuying Google sponsored ads might be a bad idea.

Google "lieberman mccain." Or, click here.

The result, at least as of this writing?

Sponsored Link
Lieberman & McCain
Senator Lieberman Joins McCain's Team. Learn Why You Should Join!

Clicking the link takes one to "Citizens for McCain," an area on the official McCain website dedicated to encouraging Democrats and Independents to vote for Republican John McCain for President.

It is not clear whether this is on purpose or is some sort of slip through unfamiliarity with Google ad buying, but it's very interesting.

In fact, one site reports seeing an actual ad with a photo of the two men.

Incidentally, there are not similar sponsored ad buys for Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, former Ohio Rep. Rob Portman, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, all of whom are said to be on McCain's short list.

Searching for the text "Joins McCain's Team. Learn Why You Should Join!" comes up with a couple of other possibilities: Tom Coburn, an anti-pork Senator from Oklahoma, and....actor Sylvester Stallone! The former results in a 404; he latter links to a focusing on McCain's military service and imprisonment by the Vietnamese.

Dani AI

Generated

Noting ’s original observation and ’s screenshot, an unexpected sponsored ad appearing next to searches about a prospective running mate is interesting but not definitive on its own. Keyword buys, landing‑page routing, redirects, cached pages or third‑party ad buys can all produce results that look like a premature "reveal." The safest approach is to treat the ad as an artifact to investigate rather than proof of an announcement.

Practical checks that produce reliable evidence:

  • Reproduce the query in a clean environment (private/incognito, logged out) and use an ad‑preview/diagnosis tool to avoid personalization or local-geo effects.
  • Capture the ad and the search result with timestamps and note location and browser state. Multiple independent screenshots are much stronger than a single image.
  • Inspect the ad destination for redirects and final landing page status. Example quick check (replace with the actual target URL when available):
curl -I -L "http://target.example/path"

This follows redirects and shows HTTP headers so the final destination can be verified.

  • Check archived snapshots (e.g., web archives) from the date in question to see what the landing page actually contained at that time. Site owners’ server logs or hosting control panels provide definitive evidence but are only available to the site owner.

For advertisers and campaign teams: stage campaign assets, require a QA/approval step before any live keywords reference potential personnel, use exact or restricted match types and negative keywords for sensitive names, and schedule ads only after confirmation. Prebuilt creative should be kept on internal URLs until public release.

Caveat: political ad platforms and policies change over time, and only a combination of archived pages, logs, and independent screenshots will reliably show whether an ad reflected a real announcement or a configuration/redirect artifact.

Member Avatar for slfisher
slfisher 0 Posting Whiz

Coincidentally, the Wall Street Journal today did a story on how the McCain campaign is targeting Internet ad buys.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121988099541678063.html?mod=special_page_campaign2008_topbox

Member Avatar for abe55
abe55 0 Newbie Poster

Fantastic find!! The keyword targeting is pretty 'coincidental'.... I did a quick Google Blog Search and found another website that caught a screen grab of the same ad. If its true, you scooped CNN!!

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