In case you missed it, comScore recently released a report entitled The Digital Politico: 5 Ways Digital Media is Shaping the 2012 Presidential Election. The report analyzes key digital campaign elements that have impacted the primaries, with an eye to how these will affect the general election.

Among the key themes discussed in the report is social media. Social media’s ubiquity and rise in popularity in recent years have largely contributed to shaping a more social environment online – not just among friends, but also between brands and consumers as well as candidates and voters. Today, social media has become an integral part of the political media landscape, growing as a primary channel for campaigns to reach out to their constituents, provide open lines of communication, and weigh in on the issues of the day (when they can’t get on TV, of course).

Through social media, a wider group of voters have found a way of more actively engaging in political discussion, debates, and issue advocacy. Whereas people may once have gathered in small groups to share their political opinions, they are now able to do the same with a broader number of people online by simply writing a post and clicking a link to share these with friends. As a result, in addition to and in some cases in place of the political conversations that typically take place in small groups around office watercoolers, similar conversations now take place on people’s Facebook timelines and Twitter feeds, giving birth to the “digital watercooler.” The true power of the “digital watercooler,” however, is the ability to amplify these debates – which used to occur between a few people – to dozens or even hundreds of people in one’s social networks.

Beyond merely engaging a core base of supporters, however, campaigns have also found value in social media as a means for reaching a broader prospective audience. Although social media continues to evolve as an advertising channel, a comScore analysis of both the Republican and Democratic social strategies to date demonstrates how and why it needs to be considered along with each of the other more established media channels. Like other mass media, social media has the ability to reach an audience and deliver an impression with the ability to persuade a voter’s opinion and compel them to act. What has not traditionally been understood is the scale at which social media can reach prospective audiences and how it may actually influence the behavior of those reached. The following data reveal how campaigns can capitalize on ‘earned’ media impressions through Facebook that can be similar in scale – and in some cases much larger – than the number of impressions delivered by their paid display ad campaigns. Earned impressions are defined as advertising messages people pass on to their friends and associates via social networks, functioning as bonus advertising providing additional exposures at no added cost.

While the Obama campaign delivered nearly 800 million paid display ads in January – a significant number on its own – it leveraged Obama’s 25 million Facebook fans to deliver nearly 66 million additional earned impressions virally. On the Republican side, Ron Paul more than doubled his paid media presence with earned impressions, while Romney received half as many impressions and Santorum nearly matched his paid total. In other words, the Obama campaign generated more free advertising by fans spreading ad messages virally than the sum total of all the paid advertising of all the Republican candidates.

It is fair to say that on sheer volume of exposure, the Obama campaign is far outpacing Republicans in leveraging social media. On the other hand, if we look at the virality ratio (ratio of paid to earned impressions) Ron Paul clearly won that race by getting more than twice as many free exposures than the number he paid for. If one were to apply the average online display ad CPM (cost per thousand impressions) of $3, then the 30 million earned impressions received by the Ron Paul campaign were worth nearly $100,000 in advertising in one month. Because messages endorsed by friends can in some cases be more likely to persuade the thoughts and feelings of those exposed, the value of these viral impressions may be far greater than the initial estimate. The digital lesson there is that a compelling ad will indeed travel, amplifying the candidate’s message and value of the online dollars spent. It is well worth the time and effort for campaigns to understand the degree to which the message resonates with fans before running the campaign.

An analysis of the frequency of exposures across candidates is also insightful. On average, each paid exposure to a fan results in 0.68 of an exposure to a friend of that fan. This further demonstrates the unique capabilities of social media in engaging a broader mix of users. Gingrich ads stood out as an exception to the general pattern in that they managed to expose friends of fans more often than his actual fans. Even though Gingrich had a much smaller base of fans, this suggests those fans were passing those messages onto their friends at an unusually high rate of frequency.

This illustration highlights how social media effectively serves as a channel for campaigns to generate a word-of-mouth effect among supporters, broadening the reach of their campaign messages at a fraction of what it would normally cost to do so on other platforms.

Another important component of a campaign’s social media presence is to understand which audiences they are reaching. One might assume that those who visit the campaign’s website or who become fans of a given candidate are likely to be engaged constituents and supporters. While that may certainly be the case, our data also suggest that these two groups may be very different audiences in reality. For example, 57 percent of visitors to BarackObama.com are age 45 and older, compared to just 22 percent of his Facebook fans. Overall, his social audience skews younger than the audience he reaches via his website. Mitt Romney, on the other hand, shows the opposite pattern. Although he has not yet amassed an audience that is anywhere near President Obama’s, the audience he is reaching through social means actually skews older than the audience that visits his website.

Such marked differences suggest that campaign operations must understand who their audience is for each media and design their strategies accordingly. As we conclude the primary portion of the 2012 election season and Mitt Romney assumes the role of the Republican nominee, we’ll be keeping an eye on both the Obama and Romney campaigns to see how they continue to leverage social media and what effect their social strategies will ultimately have on their campaigns.

Over the years, comScore has published several studies – including one this past week – that illustrate how the click is often the wrong metric for measuring the effectiveness of online display advertising. We have also shown that simply being exposed to an online ad, even when a click does not happen, often drives meaningful lifts in site visitation, purchase behavior and other key performance metrics. These findings continue to change how success is perceived and measured in digital advertising. Just as with other media such as television, radio and print, marketers are beginning to understand that an action at the exact moment of exposure is not the only indicator of effective advertising. Accumulated exposures, even without clicks, provide value to brands that should not be discounted.

While the click is often a poor metric of success for branding campaigns, it should be noted that there are certain instances where clicks on banner ads do indeed matter. Most notably, for industries that deal heavily with direct response marketing, the click is the primary means through which the specific marketing call-to-action occurs, whether that is submitting an online quote or requesting more information about a product or service.

An industry where the click remains relevant, and one in which I spend a great deal of my time, is the pharmaceutical industry. In direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical marketing, the click is an important metric that correlates with a campaign’s ultimate success in driving patient and prospect conversions. Educating patients about a medical condition and how to treat it is not something that a banner ad or interactive ad unit can do alone, especially when one considers the amount of real estate that a drug’s accompanying safety information requires. Even a television ad faces challenges in conveying convincing and compelling information about a particular treatment in 30 to 90 seconds. Indeed, there are very few mass marketing vehicles that are as effective in educating patients about a particular treatment as a website. In our studies on pharmaceutical advertising campaigns, we have found it’s the depth of information provided on a pharmaceutical brand’s site or microsite that’s a key determinant of success in attracting and converting patients.

But what is among the more important drivers of traffic to these sites? The answer: clicks on display banner ads.

In the past six years, comScore has chronicled the correlation between various pharmaceutical ad campaign elements and conversions. We have found that, more than any other digital marketing tactic, getting condition sufferers to a brand’s website drives more visits to a doctor, more discussions about conditions and the brand, and ultimately more prescriptions. Overall, the best thing a banner ad campaign, interactive or not, can do to support this endeavor is to drive traffic to a dedicated site or microsite. That action is directly captured by our old acquaintance, the click.

This is not to say that our other research on lifts to be gained from simple exposures do not apply to the pharmaceutical industry. Banners also provide view-through value (although perhaps to a lesser extent) in increasing brand awareness and favorability. Users who might not click on banner ads may nevertheless end up on a pharmaceutical site by recalling the ads they’ve seen and searching for the brands that they saw or typing brand URLs directly into their browsers. However, direct-to-consumer marketing in the pharmaceutical industry just happens to be able to leverage the click differently, since clicks coming from ad campaigns can drive branded site visitation and site conversions. For pharma, banner ad campaigns are very important contributors of traffic to brand websites because they typically appear at targeted sites, whose visitors are likely to be seeking more information about a condition or treatment. In a sense, these pharma banner ads perform somewhat like search ads in that they are directed to a more qualified audience. The ad the audience sees is usually limited to an invitation to visit a site or microsite to learn more about the brand, since a good portion of the ad is taken up by federally mandated safety information. The only way to obtain the detailed information necessary to influence condition sufferers to take the necessary actions that ultimately lead to having a physician prescribe a treatment is to visit a branded website.

So while the amount of traffic that goes to a branded drug site from a click is relatively small, it is highly qualified traffic. As a result, while the click on a banner ad may not be an appropriate metric for many industries, it remains an important measure of ad effectiveness for the pharma industry.

Today comScore is excited to announce the U.S. launch of Mobile Metrix 2.0, the next generation of mobile audience measurement. Mobile Metrix 2.0 provides mission critical insights into the behavior of the most active mobile media consumers: smartphone owners. Mobile Metrix 2.0 is based on passive behavioral data collected from a 10,000+ person panel (whose members have agreed to install comScore’s measurement software on their mobile devices). When combined with data from comScore’s census network of tagged sites and apps, Mobile Metrix 2.0 delivers our clients an unprecedented view of the U.S. mobile consumer.

Five years ago this month we released the world’s first syndicated service based on panels of metered-smartphones, but much has changed in the past half-decade. In 2006 there was no iPhone, no Android platform, and if you were one of the few people downloading a mobile app you were likely running it on Palm Treo or a Symbian smartphone. But the biggest change has been the explosive growth and mainstreaming of mobile devices—there are now more than 106 million smartphone owners in the U.S., a majority of people acquiring a new phone are buying smartphones, and sometime this year most Americans will have one of these powerful devices in their pocket.

Smartphones have changed the way people use and consume digital media, becoming a critical channel for publishers and an increasingly important platform for marketers who want to deliver ads, offers, and other messages to consumers. Mobile Metrix 2.0 lets publishers, marketers, and agencies find and understand their audience in mobile. In addition to unduplicated audience sizes and demographic profiles, Mobile Metrix 2.0 provides granular data on audience engagement — such as time spent browsing sites, using apps, and total duration — and does this at the total market level and at the platform level for Android, iOS, and RIM smartphones. We can observe, for example, how usage of the top mobile publisher properties is divided between the mobile browser and apps.

The fundamental innovation in Mobile Metrix 2.0, though, is the application of our patent-pending Unified Digital Measurement (UDM) methodology to mobile. UDM unifies our mobile panel data and the vast dataset generated by our census network of tagged sites (both ‘classic web’ and mobile-optimized) and apps, providing the most granular and accurate metrics available today.

At comScore we’ve always strived to provide powerful analytics that help our clients improve and optimize their decision-making in an inherently complex digital universe. Mobile Metrix 2.0 delivers the actionable data and intelligence needed to accomplish just that.

Yesterday, comScore released a new report entitled The Digital Politico: 5 Ways Digital Media is Shaping the 2012 Presidential Election, which highlights the key elements of the U.S. Presidential campaigns’ digital strategies – such as online advertising, online fundraising, social media, and search – and how they are being leveraged to improve their chances of victory in November.

With each successive political cycle, digital media continues to ramp up and play a more prominent role in campaign outreach operations. While TV and radio ads still dominate campaign expenditures, digital media tactics are increasingly being used to influence the media narrative and voter perceptions. In recent years, the Obama campaign has been at the forefront of this movement, going on a targeted digital offensive long before other candidates did. Early in 2011, the Obama campaign began delivering a massive number of online display ads across the web each month and it has trended steadily upward since. In January, the campaign delivered 778 million ads and followed that up with 835 million in February, representing millions of dollars of online advertising each month.

While the Obama campaign was blanketing the web with ads in 2011, the Republicans were almost nowhere to be found. In fact, the Obama campaign outnumbered the combined effort of the four leading Republican campaigns with any notable online ad presence by a ratio of 10 to1 in the past six months, reflecting a significant difference in advertising strategy between Obama and the rest of the candidates. In February alone, Obama had a share of voice in display advertising of 86 percent compared to the rest of the candidates, who opted instead to use the more traditional channels of TV and radio advertising to influence the hearts and minds of voters, especially in the critical days before voters cast their ballots in the primaries. As a result, Republicans seem to largely be underplaying the digital advertising channel, at least at this stage of the campaign.

Without the need to fight in a primary, the Obama campaign’s online strategy reveals that it is likely more interested in long-term voter engagement and brand-building. An analysis of some of the most heavily-placed ads by the Obama campaign over the first few months of the year reveals a few themes emerging: (1) general brand-building, (2) issue definition, and (3) voter & constituency engagement. The ads below highlight each of these appeals to supporters. More recently, ads targeted to specific voter groups have appeared. These include Women for Obama and even Pet Lovers for Obama.

Analysis of the top 3 web publishers of display ads for each of the leading Republican candidates reveals an interesting mix of strategies. Over the past six months, Mitt Romney for President advertised mostly on Facebook, with 58.2 percent of its ads coming over the social network – the highest percentage seen for any candidate so far. Newt 2012 delivered nearly 30 percent of its display ads through the Drudge Report and more than 20 percent through the Fox News Digital Network – both sites known to have conservative leanings. Meanwhile, Rick Santorum for President delivered the highest share of its display ad impressions on TheBlaze.com, Glenn Beck’s political blog owned by Clear Channel. These differences in strategy suggest that Santorum and Gingrich have been focusing primarily on primary voters, while the Romney campaign may have always had its eyes looking ahead to the general election.

With the primaries now in our rear view mirror and Romney the presumptive Republican nominee, we’ll be keeping a close eye on the Obama and Romney campaigns’ use of display advertising in the coming months. With more money than ever before expected to reach the candidates’ campaign coffers, we can expect to see it kick into high gear in the months ahead.

This post contains excerpts from Eli's original story published at SearchEngineWatch on 4/23/2012

The online video market has been predominantly characterized by two fundamentally different types of content: user generated content (UGC) and professionally-produced premium content. The former has incredible reach, but due to a variety of factors such as potentially unsafe brand environments and lower production values it does not command the same high CPMs as the latter. Premium video content, which more closely resembles the TV environment, offers a more premium ad placement and CPM.

The past couple of years, however, have given rise to a third form of online video: "Web TV". This hybrid form of video content bridges the gap between these two ends of the spectrum by combining shorter form content more typical of UGC and higher production values that more closely resemble premium/TV.

Perhaps the best examples of Web TV can be found on YouTube's partner channel program, which features higher quality programming in safer brand environments. Brands such as Machinima and Maker Studios are attracting tens of millions of viewers per month, along with very high engagement. Because if offers both the scale and quality of experience delivered, there is clearly a sizeable – and growing – opportunity for monetization.

In order to attract the eyeballs that will deliver on Web TV's potential as a sizeable advertising market, publishers should be making use of search for acquisition. However, comScore data shows that while search is being leveraged by the major premium video channels like Hulu, the same cannot be said of Web TV.

Different Ways of Attracting Eyeballs

Hulu invests heavily in paid search to help attract eyeballs, with 16 percent of their 10 million search clicks in March coming via SEM. YouTube, in contrast, has less than 1 percent of its 366 million search clicks coming from paid search.

While both sites have ramped up their spend over the past year, Hulu has made particularly notable jumps in paid traffic during that time, while YouTube has increased more steadily. It's clear that both sites understand the value of this investment, though Hulu is chasing those ad dollars a bit harder at the moment – which makes sense given the premium CPMs it's after.

Beyond an increase in paid search as a whole, it is also important to think about what terms they are bidding on. (Obviously, being owned by Google means that YouTube isn't in the same paid search "investment" position as Hulu, but it still bids on other engines, and incurs the opportunity cost of premium ad space on Google SERPs). Both websites are bidding on their own brand terms, but branded paid search only makes up about 25 percent of YouTube's SEM traffic, as opposed to Hulu, where over 50 percent of their SEM traffic is branded.

Outside of its own branded terms, Hulu focuses almost exclusively on the names of shows in its library. There is the occasional bid on "watch free TV online" and related items, but Hulu generally does not concern itself with generic "watching video" type of searching. Premium content is Hulu's bread and butter, and its search investment reflects its adherence to that monetization strategy.

YouTube relies more heavily on generic term to push their UGC library via paid search, with some top terms including "science videos, science videos for kids, free movies, free movies online" and other related terms. Although YouTube does have some premium content, and a wealth of aforementioned Web TV content, neither form of content currently appears to be a significant focus of its paid search efforts.

As YouTube ramps up its partner channel program worldwide, it may be wise to think about a paid brand search strategy with larger partners. If Web TV is ever to command similar CPMs to premium content videos, then driving title recognition with the viewers out there will be as important as the upgraded content itself.

Too Early to Tell, But SEM Will Deliver

Online video still has a lot of runway left before it reaches maturity. Smartphone and tablet adoption, the wealth of streaming service options through your set top box or video game console, licensing agreements for content, vertical integration, and net neutrality only scratch the surface as to what we will see in the coming years.

Video marketers should prepare themselves for the Web TV boom and figure out how to make the best use of search for viewer acquisition. With its ability to deliver both scale and attractive CPMs, the future of Web TV looks bright. For those who want to take advantage of its promise, a modest search investment now has the ability to deliver significant long-term value.