Online Political Ad Spending Goes to Email, Not Ads

From a MarketingVox article:

Though online spending by political advertisers is up from the levels of the 2004 national election, the portion going to online ad placements is actually down.

A report by research firm PQ Media on political media spending claims that email accounts for 80 percent of the $40 million spent online by political advertisers leading up to this year's midterm elections, ClickZ reports. The shift can be explained by a need for candidates to focus more on geotargeting during the midterm, whereas during a national election advertisers can move more toward mainstream political websites. (Italics added)

"Is there more online advertising than there was in 2002? The answer is 'yes,' but compared to 2004 there is much less [online] advertising because it's missing that national component," said Dr. Leo Kivijarv, VP and head of research at PQ Media.

So, even though the use of online ads are down from levels in 2004, this doesn't mean that advertisers ignored the internet. Their focus merely shifted to a more targeted method, email. There are other mediums that may have seen increased attention during this election. The biggest one probably being online video.

As Jimmy Zimmerman mentioned on his blog yesterday, online video is another ad medium that politicians need to pay attention to, especially in the coming years. He states:

With online video streaming still being so young, I bet we will see online video making more of an impact in the future.

In the years to come, political candidates will need to stay on top of new Internet trends including online video, blog networks, and social networking.

As an absentee voter for Texas I relied on political commercials from Youtube and other sites to make informed decisions. Since I couldn't see the geotargeted commercials on Utah television or recieve the geotargeted direct mail at my Utah address, I had to do my own searching. I wonder what happened to those geotargeted emails though?

I imagine online video was a big influence on absentee voters, who had to research their candidates from afar. Are there any other absentee voters who would agree with that?