November 2012

Alan Murray is leaving the Wall Street Journal to assume the role of president of the Pew Research Center, effective in January.

Murray, 57, is currently the Journal's deputy managing editor and online executive editor. In his new role he will oversee the Pew Research Center's seven projects covering topics ranging from journalism to religion to social trends. As part of the Washington-based Pew Charitable Trusts, the non-partisan Pew Research Center's mission is to inform the press, public and policy makers. Murray, in the statement announcing his appointment, described the Center as a "rock of reliable information amidst a sea of supposition and spin."

As the presidential campaign trudges into its waning hours, the embattled Mitt Romney and Barack Obama election teams are ramping up their on-the-ground efforts while still flooding local and national TV with a barrage of last ditch ads. Both campaigns are also turning to the Web with 11th-hour ads, and President Obama is by far the digital aggressor.

As documented by FEC reports, the Obama campaign has outspent Romney's outfit on digital advertising by a hearty 10-1 ratio (47 million to 4.7 million). Yet, those FEC numbers often lack specificity. To remedy that, the ad search engine and analytics company Moat has provided Adweek with a custom report shedding some light on both campaigns' display strategies. According to Moat, the Obama campaign has maintained a 90 percent share of voice across all indexed domains over the past two months. And while both campaigns appear to be experimenting with various tactics, the Obama effort resembles some of the more sophisticated online marketing operations, employing a complex configuration of ad servers, exchanges and data targeting platforms. Moat's search index data, which compares digital display impressions across tens of thousands of websites throughout September and October, suggests that while the Romney campaign has worked to increase its share of voice in October—the campaign nearly doubled its share of voice across all domains last month—the Obama team ran display ads across 2,765 publishers to Romney's 627.

Most people know certain things about the Internet. They know that cables run under the sea, that wires come into your homes, and that modems carry the digital signals to your devices. But they’ve probably never heard of Internet Exchange Points, and that’s where the magic of the Internet really happens.

Internet Exchange Points (aka IXPs) are the manufacturing floor of the Internet — that is where bandwidth is created and deployed. And bandwidth is just like water and oil and other economic goods: If your country has a lot of it, prices fall; if it doesn’t have a surplus, prices go up. And that has a big impact on the web companies that buy bandwidth. Though Internet Exchange Points are a key building block of the Internet economy, you’d never guess it from where they’re located. They don’t remotely resemble other temples of commerce. You don’t see people standing in them yelling at each other, like you would at a stock exchange. Instead, they can be located inside a beat-up building near a railroad track. Sometimes there’s not a single human being in the vicinity.

If you're an independent female voter living in Ohio, and boast more than 100 Facebook friends, the two presidential campaigns have spent as much as $50 to advertise to you in the last four months. Conversely, if you're a registered Democrat living in New York who never uses the social networking service, the campaigns have spent as little as $5 in ads directed to you.

That's according to privacy company Abine, which released a tool this week that allows people to estimate how much their vote is worth to the presidential campaigns, as measured by ad dollars. The interactive tool asks users to enter factors like gender, voting history, state of residence, number of Facebook friends, and how often they visit news sites. The tool then calculates an estimate of the amount of ad spending in all media by campaigns to reach that user; spending in online media accounts for approximately 6-9% of the total, according to Abine. To arrive at the estimate, Abine started with the premise that average ad spending by campaigns per U.S. voter comes to $22. The company adds up to $7 to that figure for users who live in battleground states like Ohio, and subtracts the same amount for those in solidly blue or red states, like Massachusetts. Beyond state of residence, the tool also looks at how many Facebook friends people have, how many news sites they tend to visit, and voting history.