• by Shankar Gupta , January 11, 2007

The next U.S. presidential election is 22 months in the future, but at least two hopefuls have already started online campaigns.

Former Senator John Edwards and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney have both recently started running ads on political blogs, via the ad network Blogads. What's more, both candidates have promised extensive online efforts in the coming race.

Edwards' blog ads began appearing earlier this month, on sites including Daily Kos, MyDD, AmericaBlog, and Crooks and Liars. The ads offer links to Edwards' video message from New Orleans announcing his candidacy, hosted on YouTube, and to his campaign site.

Matt Gross, head of online communications for the Edwards campaign, said the candidate intends to use the Web to deliver his message to voters unfiltered. "An important goal during the announcement was to get people to hear directly from John Edwards about his vision for the country and his belief in what this campaign is about," he said. "We saw blog ads as an effective way to bring people in the blogosphere directly to the campaign Web site, where they could hear from Edwards directly."

Gross said that the campaign also includes direct outreach on social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, as well as SMS messaging to bring people to the campaign sited. "The Web is central to our goal of creating a truly national grassroots campaign in 2007 and 2008," he said.

Gov. Mitt Romney, who announced his presidential exploratory committee last week, also ran a series of blog ads on right- and libertarian-leaning blogs, including OutsideTheBeltway.com, RightWingNews.com, the Townhall.com blog network, and Powerline.com. Romney's spokesman, Kevin Madden, said the candidate intends to run an "aggressive, innovative and integrated campaign" that will include search marketing.

Madden said that Romney hopes the blog ads will reach the most influential voters. "The effort is driven by our recognition of a very unique and motivated audience among New Media devotees," he said. "Our blog ads help reach this audience and drive traffic to our mittromney.com website and provide more information about Mitt Romney, his campaign, his ideas and how they can then in turn join our effort."

Michael Bassik, a political consultant with MSHC Partners, said the blogosphere is gaining importance in political communication. "There's no better place to reach political junkies so far away from November 2008," he said.

In the last presidential election--when the blogosphere was less mature--ads on blogs didn't surface until around 11 months before the vote, according to Blogads founder Henry Copeland.