ClickZ has praised Meg Whitman’s online-ad buy of $3 million, the largest buy in political history, she even outspent the Democratic National Convention’s nationwide online ad spend of roughly $2.5 million, but what the article hardly touches on is how small of an amount that actually was, especially for the former CEO of eBay to spend on digital advertising.

For the past year, Google’s political team has been promoting a concept of 10 in 2010, a goal to get campaigns to spend 10% of a campaign’s budget in online advertising for the 2010 election cycle. In reality, campaigns were spending under 5% according to a panel discussion hosted by Politico and Facebook. Meg Whitman’s $3 million online spend accounted for about 1.8% of her roughly $170 million budget, far less than the hoped for 10%.

Why is this important? Why am I talking about this on Fights for Jobs? Let me ask you this, how many of you spend your time reading the newspaper as opposed to NYTimes.com? The Pew Research Center reported in 2009 that 70% of adult Americans find news online and that 55% went online to get involved in the political process in 2008. When was the last time you did not fast-forward through TV advertising? Roughly 90% of those who can TiVo through commercials, do. We recognize that there is a fundamental shift in the way all of us find information, consume media, research politics, and generally live our lives.

Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once said that, “Those who won our independence by revolution were not cowards. They did not fear political change,” likewise, we do not fear political change, even in the midst of elections. While most political candidates were spending barely 5% of their budgets in online advertising, we embraced the coming change and put approximately 55% of our budget into online advertising. We placed online ads with Google, YouTube, Hulu, Yahoo!, Bing, Facebook, and LinkedIn to support candidates who were committed to fighting for jobs in the 112th Congress, resulting in over 300 million web impressions.

We believe in reaching out to Americans and communicating with them where they want instead of throwing money at a TV commercial that will most likely not be watched.  Using online communication as our main tool, we were able to help 75% of our supported candidates, all of whom were non-incumbents, win their races in order to help continue the fight to keep jobs as the top priority.

This new column on Fights for Jobs will focus on the role and use of technology in politics. These posts will range from discussing our tactics in the last election, like our purchase of the Election Day masthead ad on YouTube.com, to pointing out innovative ways technology is being used to advocate for different pieces of legislation. Stay tuned and if you like what you read then make sure you subscribe.

In such a lopsided election were there are many, many victories and many more victors, it is easy to put up gaudy numbers and claim responsibility for all that went right.  Don’t get me wrong, there were plenty of organizations who did make a difference in the outcome of elections and they deserve to take some of the credit.  However, the more interesting question for BIPAC is centered around how did we help our members and partners move forward with their own successes in candidate advocacy to be in a better position to effect legislation in the upcoming legislative session (on both Capitol Hill and in the fifty statehouses) and the 2011/2012 election cycle?

While politics precedes policy, winning elections is only half the battle and a full battle is never completed.

The most important success stories for BIPAC and the business community as a result of the 2010 election were not necessarily the candidate victories.  While these victories were and are important, the impact and the infrastructure left behind by BIPAC’s newly created political programs will continue well past the 2010 election.  The impact of creating permanent infrastructure with our partners will have a longer lasting positive impact than blowing large sums of money on activities that no one remembers less than a month after the election.

In the political industry, few ever look beyond the current election cycle.  Our approach will always have an eye looking at the next election (or two).  With our forward-looking approach, we purposely position ourselves out on that leading edge.  Many online experts, including Google, were advising organizations and candidates to spend 10% of their campaign budget using online advertising.  While few hit that low mark, BIPAC spent 55% of our budget towards online advertising.  Our 12,000 targeted internet ad campaigns were either event, mobile, email, search, placement or video ads, which were placed using Google, Facebook, Bing, Yahoo, LinkedIn, Hulu and YouTube.  After reading that last sentence some of you may say, “Leading edge?  That sounds more like bleeding edge.”  Maybe, but in the near future that leading edge will make sense and become the norm.

Why?  While many are comfortable and sold that traditional television advertising is the only way to go, we see the future now and that future is utilizing internet communications to reach voters.  In the past, campaigns dictated to voters the medium voters would receive candidate/issue information.  Today, voters select the medium they dictate they want to receive their information.  The bottom line is this: if you as an organization or candidate are not making your information available to voters in the medium they want, then you are not giving yourself a chance to successfully get your message out.

Does this mean campaigns will abandon television adverting anytime soon?  No, traditional television advertising will continue to play a role in campaigns, but budget percentages for traditional versus online will be changing rapidly over the next few cycles.

One opportunity that I would like to have would be to run a competitive campaign without spending a dollar on television.  At this point in time, I am sure this opinion would put me in the minority, but I not only believe you could be competitive with this strategy, but I think you could win by spending none of your resources on television and nearly all of them online.

With this aggressive approach utilizing online advertisement and communications, with some old school campaigning in the mix too, we deployed in thirty-six campaigns in eleven states.  By working closely with the extensive state partner network, we are able to collaborate with the best political professionals in the backyards of the most important races across the country.  These partnerships, and I do mean close working partnerships, are flexible and result in creative plans that impact both federal and state races.

Being out on the leading edge can sometimes feel lonely when you are in the thick of a fight, but after the dust settled the new technology public relations firm, The Access Point, called BIPAC’s new political programs one of the five “best of the best” for 2010 for our election day buyout of YouTube.  While this is nice, that leading edge has already moved forward and we all need to keep pace or we will be scratching our heads after the next election and wondering what went wrong.