Obama Dominating Web Down the Stretch

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.