As election season heats up, political candidates and their campaign teams endeavor to reach as many eligible voters as possible in order to ensure victory at the polls. Today, within the American two-party system, organizations like i360 for Republicans and Clarity Campaigns/TargetSmart Communications for Democrats collect vast amounts of data in order to specifically target certain slices of the electorate. In fact, by using this information, they can often predict who a person is likely to vote for before they even cast their ballot.
In years past, campaigns could compile a detailed list of the characteristics which defined their voter base, but they could do little to leverage this data for advertising purposes. The advent of digital broadcasting has changed this entirely. By using digital data rather than analogue waveforms, targeting and tracking methods have become much more sophisticated. Utilizing the most current data-mining technology, candidates can now customize their messages for each viewer, based on the known data about the individuals who watch that television.
Political parties collect a slew of information about each household – from Facebook ‘likes’ and Twitter tweets, candidates are able to infer not only your basic interests but your sentiments towards larger cultural issues. Of course, other demographic data is collected as well; income range, family composition, automobile leases and the number of cell phones in a home, for example. The vast datasets holding detailed characteristic and trait profiles of everyone in America are a precious resource for those seeking to gain a foothold in the political arena.
Political campaign marketing teams understand that ‘personalized’ conversations, in an era of Netflix and other on-demand services, are what it will take to chase the steadily shrinking number of persuadable voters. Therefore the ability to send select ads into homes based on “Big Data” has far-reaching implications. What was once something of a niche experiment is now widely available – DirecTV and Dish Network announced this year that they would be partnering to help political campaigns use their addressable capabilities to target political commercials at a household level. According to Keith Kazerman, senior VP-ad sales at DirecTV, “The partnership will give campaigns the ability to show their messages to a precise set of potential voters and eliminate spending waste.”
Top-tier political campaigns are hoping that they can achieve a major victory following large investments in targeted ads. Early data has shown such “addressable” advertising on TV to be highly effective. In fact, households that received addressable ads tuned away from the TV 38% less often than those receiving regular commercials. Though this type of advertising currently accounts for less than 1% of overall ad spending, once campaigns see how successful targeted advertising is, they will certainly want to do more of it.
The impact of that data analytics can have in determined an election is astounding. Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, which was responsible for reinventing the art of modern campaigning through data, succeed in turning out thousands of infrequent and new voters. Since then, the tactics used by their team – which included collecting individual TV-viewing information to get more from each ad dollar – have been embedded into the contemporary political landscape.
This year, with record numbers being spent to acquire data and develop sophisticated statistical models, we can expect the role of Big Data in politics to only grow further. But in both the primaries and the general election, it’s still up to the American electorate to prove these data systems right.
By Beth Kelly – Ms. Kelly is an environmentally-conscious freelance writer and blogger from Lansing, Michigan. A graduate of DePaul University, she worked in Poland and South Korea briefly before returning to Chicago, IL where she now lives with her two cats. Become a contributor by submitting material to write4us[at]techinamerica.com.
