According to The Daily Beast, Rand Paul’s use of AdWords to attempt to score points against Jeb Bush is a “passive-aggressive trolling game.” In our opinion, trolling it may be, but it is also an incredibly effective use of Google’s paid search.

Rand Paul, in case you aren’t aware, is considered to be likely to run for the U.S. Presidency in 2016.1 The day that Jeb Bush announced his intention to explore the possibility of his own presidential run2, RandPAC started showing their own ads when people searched for Jeb Bush.

The Paul campaign also used AdWords to insert their ads into searches for Mike Huckabee, former Arkansas governor, after he indicated he might also be interested in people’s votes and/or money. Right now they’re making light of it:

… Paul’s senior adviser Doug Stafford said they had chosen this method of pre-campaign campaigning “mostly because we like to amuse ourselves.”

However, using AdWords to target potential voters is extremely savvy and potentially much more cost effective than other campaigning methods.

The Future of Campaigning May Lay On the Internet

As was pointed out in the article, when people search for a candidate’s name, that’s a huge indication of interest, so the person searching is likely a potential voter. Instead of mass mailings or yard signs, campaigns are spending money on people who are most likely to be involved to some degree or another in the political process. The majority of voters go to the Internet and search engines to find out about political candidates, so it only makes sense that politicians would want to insert themselves into the process. What’s surprising is that Paul appears to be the only one doing it.

We wrote about Twitter advising UK politicians to use their demographic targeting to reach people in particular areas, and the same targeting could work wonderfully on Google. The concerns of Californians are wildly different from those of people in Idaho, and ads and messages could be tailored accordingly. It will be interesting to see if any other politician wises up and imitates Paul’s “troll game.”