French Politicians Try Marketing with Google Ads
by Alex Russel
alex.russel@collegedegreereview.com
College Degree Review Columnist
The riots that shook France to its core also helped create new Internet marketing tactics. Enter some key phrases that have illustrated the events in café conversations and on TV, and you'll find some interesting, and paid for, results.
France's brash interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, also heads the right-wing party Union for the Popular Movement (UMP). Often, he has been caught taking campaign marketing tips from American political parties, but this time he might even have outdone our cherished Republicans and Democrats.
Harnessing Google Marketing
The riots in France were huge news, and millions of French-speaking Internet searchers are going to Google to find out the latest. Of course, they are entering phrases that have been associated with the events -- words like "riots," suburbs," "violence," "burned cars," or "scum." The last is a rough translation of a profanity used by Sarkozy to identify the rioters, which many think provoked some law-abiding citizens into becoming rioters themselves.
Political Marketing Career Takes Strange Twist
Ten days into the riots, if you entered any of those phrases (in French) into the Google search engine, you would see, adjoining the results at the top of the page, a Google advertisement for a link to a petition and Web site hosted by Sarkozy's ruling party.
Opposition Shocked By Marketing
Quickly, word of the latest UMP marketing campaign hit the French headlines and sponsorship of the more controversial keywords (like "scum") was withdrawn.
But the other Google ads will continue, said a party marketing spokesman. "Since the beginning of the riots we have received many supportive e-mails or requests to circulate petitions encouraging Nicolas Sarkozy," said the spokesman to ZD Net.
"We asked our marketing company to consolidate the requests and create a single petition that could be linked to by those searching information through Google."
Unconventional Marketing Career
The choice of "scum" as a Google ad target has tempers and suspicions flaring. Sarkozy has always been one to choose caustic language to identify both opponents and criminals. Many of the former suspect that he market researches his word choices before he uses them, to be sure of their effectiveness in pleasing French right-wing voters. To many, the Google ads will confirm those suspicions.
Keyword marketing jobs are a huge new segment of the marketing business. A marketing career is more and more likely to pass through this new line of audience targeting.
Source
ZD Net
About the Author
Alex Russel is a freelance writer living in Brooklyn, New York.
Posted on: March 13, 2006
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