Google rolls the political dice… and it pays off
Typically companies donate money to both sides of the isle and across candidates within a presidential race to make sure that the guy who wins got some money from them. Google leaned very heavily towards Obama this race and it is paying off. When I learned about the shotgun approach to donations done by corporate America in my business school strategy class, my first reaction was: If company A gives a dollar to every candidate, the results is a wash, and each candidate should realize that evenly distributed money is not nearly as effective for their campaign than exclusive money given only to them.
Obama’s preferential treatment to Google (highlighted in the WSJ article above) shows that they too belive that exclusive money gets you further than the traditional shotgun approach.
If the $375K Google gave to Obama sounds high (5th largest corporte donor), that represents only 1/10th of the amount of money the Obama campaign gave Google during the same time period (for online advertising).
