Political Ads: Red vs Blue, Google vs Yahoo ~ Advertising For Success

The Rimm-Kaufman Group conducted a study to observe the use of paid search advertising in the final hours of the 2006 US midterm elections (PDF).

RKG queried Google and Yahoo for terms related to the 2006 US midterm elections from November 3, 2006 to November 6, 2006. They found:

There are few political advertisers using pay-per-click search engine marketing
Political pay-per-click advertisers use Google and not Yahoo Paid Search
Most prevalent advertisers within this query set were Accoona (search engine), Gather.com (social network), CafePress (retailer), and GOPSenators.com (National Republican Senatorial Committee)
Red ads outnumbered Blue ads 2:1
Blue ads were 3x more likely to be negative than Red ads
President Bush was not mentioned in any ad
Iraq and Al-Qaeda were mentioned only twice in ads
Only two ads linked directly to videos
Blue ads were longer than Red ads
The length of words in blue and red ads were the same
Blue ads were more likely to include an exclamation point
Red ads were more likely to contain a question mark

From the report:

We believe political pay-per-click advertising is in its infancy . . . we predict campaigns and political action committees will move aggressively into paid search advertising as a marketing channel in future elections.