Wednesday was a difficult day for The American Independent News Network, which is the larger entity that operates The Iowa Independent. Our chief executive and founder announced two of our sister sites would close and their content would be moved to The American Independent.
A recently introduced bill could have far-reaching impact on the U.S. sugar industry, including American Crystal Sugar, a farmer-owned cooperative that locked out 1,300 Midwest workers on Aug. 1.
The chairman for Herman Cain’s Iowa effort says the campaign “relied more on the word of farmers than Washington regulators” in deciding to run an ad containing claims the Environmental Protection Agency says are false.
The Iowa Senate will remain under the control of a slim 26-25 Democratic majority when it reconvenes in January 2012.
The nascent campaign of former Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad, who is campaigning for the Republican gubernatorial nomination in 2010, has taken to the Internet in an attempt to counteract an attack from Democrats that has gone unanswered for weeks.
The Iowa Democratic Party launched a Web site over the summer to promote criticism of each Republican candidate for governor, and they added Branstad to the list after he resigned as president of Des Moines University to focus on building a campaign.
The Democratic party also paid for advertisements through the Google AdWords ad network that ran on many political news sites, including the Iowa Independent. The ads say, in large, red, letters, “Terry [loves] taxes,” with a 1980s-style stencil depiction of the former four-term governor’s face. It links to a page that lists tax increases that happened under the Branstad administration. For Iowans who read political news, they were an almost constant presence on every Web page they visited.
Web ad from Gov. Terry Branstad (Screen grab: 11/13/09)
Now, Branstad’s campaign is fighting back with a Web advertisement of their own. In theirs, Branstad appears in front of a podium wagging his finger next to large text that says, “Proven. Tested. Ready.”
The ad uses messages pretty common to establishment-supported Republican campaigns. In 2000, then-Gov. George W. Bush used the tagline “Proven. Tested. Ready to lead America.” at the end of television advertisements.
That’s the closest to an exact copy I could find, but there are more: In 2007, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney ran an ad called “Tested, Proven” in Iowa. In 2008, former Nebraska Gov. and U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Mike Johanns used the phrase “Proven. Tested. Trusted.” as his catchphrase in a successful bid for U.S. Senate.
In terms of political strategy, there’s no doubt that this one is “Tested.” Arguably, it has also been “Proven.” But is it “Ready”?
Either way, the ad shows that the Branstad team knows they need to define themselves to Internet users before the other side does it for them.
Online ads are not incredibly expensive, but to ensure that Branstad’s ads appear rather than Democratic attacks, the campaign is forced to ‘outbid’ all other buyers for the same space. Google typically charges buyers money each time a visitor clicks on their advertisement on Google’s site or a third-party Web site like the Iowa Independent, and they pay third-party Web sites a portion of the revenue that generates. Each time a page with a Google advertisement loads, the system decides which advertisement to display based on the highest price each advertiser is willing to pay for it.
That means that the Iowa Democrats can continue to offer higher prices for displaying their ads, forcing Branstad to raise his bids, and vice versa. All in all, over the course of months, a bidding war could cost each side a few thousand dollars — and make lots of Web site owners happy.
And for the record, no matter how many times I see excessive punctuation in campaign ads, it bothers me every time.
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