I received an email the other day from the Web Marketing Association with the subject line, “WebAward Judges pick Obama over McCain.”

Given yesterday’s post about AdAge choosing Barack Obama as Marketer of the Year, I was interested to see what the WMA said about the Obama and McCain Web sites.

Here’s the first paragraph of the email (bold emphasis mine):

In April, the Web Marketing Association had our WebAward judges review both Hillary Clinton’s and Barack Obama’s Website in a head to head challange. Senitor Obama’s Website won the challange and he went on to win the Democratic nomination (I’m not saying it was because of us, but you have to wonder…)

Oh, and here’s a sentence from the second paragraph:

This month we asked the WebAward Judges to compaire Senitor John McCain’s Website with that of Senitor Obama’s.

Egads. The average piece of spam I receive has fewer misspellings and grammatical errors.

According to the WMA Web site, the organization was founded “to help set a high standard for Internet marketing and web development. Staffed by volunteers, this organization is made up of marketing, advertising, public relations and web design professionals from around the world who share a passion for improving the quality of advertising, marketing and web site development on the Internet today and in the future.”

One of the categories in which the Obama and McCain sites were judged was copywriting. According to the WMA email, “Neither Websites have any of the editing issues some large organizations can experience.”

Too bad the same can’t be said about the WMA.

Takeaway for marketers: If your marketing communications are written in a such a way that they’d be lucky to receive a C- from a middle school English teacher, don’t expect them to do anything more than make your business or organization look stupid.

These are intensely political days, and one of the many sites I’ve been visiting regularly is Andrew Sullivan’s The Daily Dish over at The Atlantic, which just redesigned its site.

Blecch. Well, Blecch for Daily Dish readers. Because now when I visit Andrew’s blog, I have to take the extra step of scrolling my browser to see any actual content. That’s a big step backwards when it comes to usability.

Look at that screen shot up there: All the real estate is taken up by the Atlantic logo (why so much dead space to the right of the logo?), navigation (elegant-looking, but unless your cursor is exactly where it needs to be, you’ll find yourself getting frustrated pretty quickly), a big blank area (what’s up with that; are ads on the way?),  a giant Daily Dish logo (does that really need to be 100 percent of the screen width?) plus a bunch of white space and the top of Andrew’s cartoon head.

But no actual content above the fold. Nada. Zilch. Feh.

Having been deep in the weeds on several major redesign projects, I can only hope that this is a work in progress and things will get better. I suspect, though, that there was too much focus on making the redesigned site look like the redesigned magazine and too little focus on usability fundamentals.

Takeaway for marketers: If you’re redesigning your site, you’re probably talking a lot about prioritizing elements and content. If your site is about content, make sure at least some of that content appears above the fold.

This morning, iMedia Connection posted this article about emerging tech trends to watch. One of those trends is a service called Veeple that allows anyone to create callout text boxes and clickable links in video. Think VH1’s Pop-Up Video with pop-ups you can click.

It’s an interesting idea, but right now the pricing is such that Veeple is going to be used mainly by companies trying to sell us stuff. Imagine the same sort of service in the hands of the average person who uploads to YouTube as opposed to the company that uploads to YouTube.

The Britney Spears guy has 9,349,536 views as I write this. That’s a lot of eyeballs, but to Veeple-ize the video would cost about $47,000. Britney guy isn’t going to pay that cost.

I think there’s some real potential with Veeple, but the biggest potential may lie in somehow melding it to those videos that reach cultural meme status and generate millions upon millions of views.

Takeaway for marketers: If you’re gonna use Veeple in your videos, don’t just say “click here to buy my stuff.” Figure out a way to be really clever about it.

In his classic comedy album No Cure For Cancer Denis Leary rants about smoking:

There’s a guy — I don’t know if you’ve heard about this guy, he’s been on the news a lot lately. There’s a guy, he’s English, I don’t think we should hold that against him, but apparently this is just his life’s dream because he is going from country to country. He has a Senate hearing in this country coming up in a couple of weeks. And this is what he wants to do. He wants to make the warnings on the packs bigger. Yeah! He wants the whole front of the pack to be the warning. Like the problem is we just haven’t noticed yet. Right? Like he’s going to get his way and all of the sudden smokers around the world are going to be going, "Yeah, Bill, I’ve got some cigarettes … HOLY SHIT! These things are bad for you?! Shit, I thought they were good for you! I thought they had Vitamin C in them and stuff!" You fucking dolt! Doesn’t matter how big the warnings are. You could have cigarettes that were called The Warnings. You could have cigarettes that come in a black pack with a skull and crossbones on the front called Tumors and smokers would be lined up around the block going, "I can’t wait to get my hands on these fucking things! I bet you get a tumor as soon as you light up! Numm Numm Numm Numm Numm!" Doesn’t matter how big the warnings are or how much they cost. Keep raising the prices, we’ll break into your houses to get the fucking cigarettes, ok? They’re a drug, we’re addicted, ok? Numm Numm Numm Numm Numm *wheeze*

Well, it looks like this English guy got his wish. Breitbart reports on the addition of graphic images to cigarette packaging in Britain. Beware about clicking that link: The image on this blog post is the far milder of the two shown in the story.

It does raise an interesting marketing issue, though: What if this concept were extended to other products? A package of Twinkies could carry an image of a morbidly obese person. Beer labels could have images of drunken vagrants on them. Boxes of sugary cereals could have pictures of kids with rotten teeth on them.

A trip to the supermarket would be a lot more interesting than it is now, that’s for sure.

Takeaway for marketers: Aren’t you glad you don’t work in the tobacco industry?

A couple of weeks ago I noted that the Obama campaign was missing out on some low-hanging Web fruit by not running a keyword campaign about Sarah Palin.

I’m Googling for information about the bailout plan yesterday and once again there’s nothing in the way of keyword advertising appearing on my results page.

The largest financial issue we’ve faced as a nation since The Great Depression, a political tsunami that’s pushed even Sarah Palin off the front page, and no one’s jumping on AdWords?

Why no ads from Obama or McCain? Or the RNC or DNC? Or even someone selling widgets and running an ad along the lines of, "Forget the bailout plan, buy my crap."

Takeaway for marketers: Forget marketers this time, here’s a takeaway for political strategists — and angel investors: There needs to be an online marketing agency that specializes in wide-ranging issues marketing on both the local and national levels. Call me and let’s get it done.