McCain's Search Man Calls Out Bad Search Coverage

Ouch. McCain’s search marketing whiz Eric Frenchman has some strong words for search marketing firm SendTec for reporting what he calls “curious data” on the paid search efforts of the Barack Obama and John McCain campaigns. He also tears into Mediapost for covering the information.

“SendTec and MediaPost should just stop trying to figure out what the two campaigns are doing when it comes to Search Marketing…. the campaigns are far more sophisticated than you observers give us credit for.”

For the record, ClickZ News hasn’t published any of SendTec’s data in our Campaign ’08 coverage, but that’s not saying we won’t. Also, many of us in the media are culprits of basing a story on what may be considered too narrow a scope of information. (The New York Times Mag’s ‘guys with cats’ trend piece being, perhaps, the most egregious example of late).

Now, the other day, I wrote a post asking, “Where’s McCain’s Keating Search Response?” Knowing it probably would bristle the hairs on the back of Monsieur Frenchman’s neck, I based it on several searches conducted out of ClickZ’s Manhattan office. I know New York is not in play and the McCain campaign could very well be running ads based on Keating-related keywords in battleground states. I noted as much in the post, and also based my commentary on the fact that I saw no organic links to McCain’s site to counteract the Keating/savings and loan scandal-related attacks against McCain.

Anyway, the reason media outlets cover these kinds of reports, or do stories based on searches from one location is because there’s no other information available. We’re curious, and there’s just not much comprehensive data out there about how the campaigns are using paid search. As Gov. Palin might put it, “Doggone it, we wanna know!”