I'm just giving our Blogads pal Henry Copeland a hard time. Check out this very promising article from Wired about political ads on blogs, er, liberal political blogs, that is:
- Not even his own staff would call Democratic congressional candidate Ben Chandler a nethead.
"He uses the Internet almost exclusively for fantasy baseball," said campaign spokesman Jason Sauer, who added that he wasn't sure whether, until recently, Chandler even knew what a blog was.
But that was before Chandler's campaign turned a $2,000 investment in blog advertising into over $80,000 in donations in only two weeks. Chandler — who won a seat in the House of Representatives Tuesday evening — definitely knows what a blog is now, Sauer said. "It's that thing that brings in money."
Political blog advertising represents the latest twist on the Internet fund-raising strategy pioneered by the campaign of Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean, which raised millions of grass-roots dollars from its Blog for America website. Chandler's campaign is the first of several that have started advertising on political blogs as a cost-effective way to reach a national audience.
....Tuesday's special election in Kentucky's sixth district marked the end of an intense two-month campaign that pitted Chandler against Republican state Sen. Alice Kerr for the House seat vacated by Ernie Fletcher, now governor of Kentucky.
Chandler, who served two terms in Kentucky as state auditor and one as attorney general, enjoyed the advantage of name recognition and held a sizable lead in January polls. But Kerr steadily closed the gap, raising over $1 million between mid-November and the end of January.
By the first week of February, polls showed the margin between the candidates narrowing fast. With Chandler trailing Kerr's fund-raising by hundreds of thousands of dollars, Chandler campaign manager Mark Nickolas decided to reach out to a new group of potential contributors: readers of political blogs.
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