A unified
computer database that gathers and refines information on millions of potential
voters is at the forefront of campaign technology – and could be the key to an
Obama win
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President Obama is also well on the way towards staging the world's
first billion-dollar campaign. Photograph: Susan Walsh/AP
|
Barack Obama's re-election team are building a vast digital data operation that for
the first time combines a unified database on millions of Americans with the
power of Facebook to target individual voters to a degree never achieved
before.
Digital
analysts predict this will be the first election cycle in which Facebook could
become a dominant political force. The social media giant has grown
exponentially since the last presidential election, rendering it for the first
time a major campaigning tool that has the potential to transform friendship
into a political weapon.
Facebook is
also being seen as a source of invaluable data on voters. The re-election team,
Obama for America, will be inviting its supporters to log on to the campaign
website via Facebook, thus allowing the campaign to access their personal data
and add it to the central data store - the largest, most detailed and
potentially most powerful in the history of political campaigns. If 2008 was
all about social media, 2012 is destined to become the "data
election".
"Facebook
is now ubiquitous," says Dan Siroker, a former Google digital analyst who
joined Obama's campaign in 2008 and now runs his own San Francisco-based
analytics consultancy, Optimizely. "Whichever candidate uses Facebook the
most effectively could win the war."
For the
past nine months a crack team of some of America's top data wonks has occupied
an entire floor of the Prudential building in Chicago devising a digital
campaign from bottom up. The team draws much of its style and inspiration from
the corporate sector, with its driving ambition to create a vote-garnering
machine that is smooth, unobtrusive and ruthlessly efficient.
Already
more than 100 geeks, some recruited at top-flight university job fairs
including Stanford, are assembled in the Prudential drawn from an array of
disciplines: statisticians, predictive modellers, data mining experts,
mathematicians, software engineers, bloggers, internet advertising experts and
online organisers.
At the core
is a single beating heart – a unified computer database that gathers and
refines information on millions of committed and potential Obama voters. The
database will allow staff and volunteers at all levels of the campaign – from
the top strategists answering directly to Obama's campaign manager Jim Messina
to the lowliest canvasser on the doorsteps of Ohio – to unlock knowledge about
individual voters and use it to target personalised messages that they hope
will mobilise voters where it counts most.
Every time
an individual volunteers to help out – for instance by offering to host a
fundraising party for the president – he or she will be asked to log onto the
re-election website with their Facebook credentials. That in turn will engage
Facebook Connect, the digital interface that shares a user's personal
information with a third party.
Consciously
or otherwise, the individual volunteer will be injecting all the information
they store publicly on their Facebook page – home location, date of birth,
interests and, crucially, network of friends – directly into the central Obama
database.
"If
you log in with Facebook, now the campaign has connected you with all your
relationships," a digital campaign organiser who has worked on behalf of
Obama says.
The
potential benefits of the strategy can already be felt. The Obama campaign this
year has attracted about 1.3 million donors, 98% of whom have contributed $250
or less – that's more than double the number at the same stage in 2008. At this
rate, Obama is also well on the way towards staging the world's first
billion-dollar campaign.
Under its motto
"Bigger, better, 2012", the Chicago team intends between now and
election day in November to create a campaign powerhouse which will allow
fundraisers, advertisers and state and local organisers to draw from the same
data source.
Joe
Rospars, the campaign's chief digital strategist, told a seminar at the
Guardian sponsored Social Media Week, that the aim was to create technology
that encourages voters to get involved, in tune with Obama's emphasis on
community organising.
Campaign
insiders say that the emphasis this year will be on efficiency more than any
headline-grabbing technical wizardry. But that should not obscure how
significant this year's presidential cycle will be in putting to the test the
first custom-made digital campaign.
Mark
Sullivan, founder of Voter Activation Network, which manages the Democratic
party's central database of voter information known as Vote Builder, says that
"what we will see in 2012 will make 2008 look really primitive".
Judith
Freeman of New Organizing Institute, who worked on both John Kerry's 2004 and
Obama's 2008 presidential campaigns, says there is a leap forward in technology
every presidential cycle, and 2012 would be no exception. "There's a
deadline – it's got to be done by election day – and that provides a huge push
to make things happen."
In 2008 the
Obama digital team was lauded around the world for its groundbreaking work on
internet fundraising. Yet in fact, the separation of its data on voters into
several distinct silos forced high-level staffers to spend hours manually
downloading information from one database to another.
The Obama
team in 2008 did a good job in beginning to tear down those walls, releasing
extraordinary fundraising energy in the process that raised about $500m online.
This year
the Chicago team hasn't knocked down the walls so much as dispensed with them
altogether. They have built from the ground up a unified database that
incorporates and connects everything the campaign knows about a voter within
it.
Rospars
said that in 2012 they no longer had to try to integrate data in the campaign.
"We are just one campaign now - we built it from scratch."
The
centralised nature of the database may raise privacy issues as the election
cycle progresses. Jeff Chester of the digital advertising watchdog Center for
Digital Democracy, which has been calling for regulators to review the growth
of digital marketing in politics, said that "this is beyond J Edgar
Hoover's dream. In its rush to exploit the power of digital data to win re-election,
the Obama campaign appears to be ignoring the ethical and moral
implications."
But from
the vantage point of the campaign the benefits are evident.
"Fusing
your data into one central store is cheaper, quicker and allows you to be more
targeted," said Jim Pugh, who was part of Obama's 2008 digital team and
now works for the progressive online movement, Rebuild the Dream.
The Obama
database incorporates Vote Builder, a store of essential information such as
age, postal address, occupation and voting history drawn from the voter files
of 190 million active voters. It lines up and matches those voter files with
data gathered from online interactions with the president's supporters –
notably the millions of pieces of information its army of canvassers collected
across the nation during the 2008 race, a list of email addresses of supporters
that it has amassed and that now stands at about 23 million, as well as the
contact information of Obama's 25 million Facebook fans.
Facebook
itself has been transformed as a political campaign tool since 2008, simply by
dint of its exponential growth. Four years ago there were about 40 million
Facebook users in the US; now there are more than 160 million – incorporating
almost the entire voting public.
The
significance of the fusion of Facebook and voter file data is hard to
overemphasise. "This is the Moneyball moment for politics," says Sam
Graham-Felsen, Obama's chief blogger in 2008. "If you can figure out how
to leverage the power of friendship, that opens up incredible
possibilities."
First among
those possibilities is that the campaign can distribute customised content
designed specifically for its Facebook fans to share with their much wider
circle of friends. The messages can be honed to a particular demographic – age,
gender, etc – as well as set of interests, and targeted on the most hotly
contested parts of the most crucial battleground states.
"Influencers"
– those people who tend to act as thought leaders among their friends on
Facebook – can be identified and prioritised.
Teddy Goff,
the digital director of the re-election team, told Social Media Week that as
the year progresses there would be more and more "persuasion through
interaction".
Individual
voters would be given access to digital platforms from which they will be able
to tell their own stories "and that's far more powerful than anything we
can say", Goff said. "That will be the story of this election -
people's own stories really moves votes."
Goff said
the campaign was focused on building relationships through social media. An
Obama message would be crafted so that "not only can it be passed to your
friends but to those friends that we think are most in need of passing it on
to".
The bottom
line is that if you are sent a message from your Facebook friend encouraging
you to turn up to an event or donate to Obama, you are vastly more likely to
respond than if the request comes from an anonymous campaign staffer.
The other
door that data integration will further open in 2012 is personalised marketing.
This has been the Holy Grail of political campaigners for decades: the idea
that you can talk directly to voters and serve them customised messages.
In the old
world of snail mail, that could be achieved to some degree through direct
marketing – ie leaflets dropped into the letter box – but that is expensive and
far too slow with today's 24-hour news cycle.
The fusion
of information into a centralised database allows you to direct market online
at much less cost and virtually instantaneously.
The
technique has begun to spread widely among commercial businesses over the past
year, and it is only a matter of time before such hyper-targeting is standard
across political campaigns. Indeed, we've already started to see it this year.
The Obama
campaign is already tailoring requests for donations to 26 distinct segments of
the voting public. The Republican are also getting in on the act.
Michele
Bachmann used customised online advertising in Iowa to reach Republican voters
only, sending to their computers messages with a local spin for each of the
state's 99 counties. That helped her win Iowa's vaunted straw poll in August
2011 (though that didn't help her in the long run). Rick Perry sent
God-praising commercials to Iowans who listed themselves as evangelicals on
Facebook.
The company
CampaignGrid, that serves mainly Republican candidates, claims to be able to
online market direct to targeted households. It has an integrated database on
110 million voters across America – some 65% of the electorate – to whom it can
serve personalised ads, following them wherever they are browsing on the
internet.
Jeff
Dittus, the company's co-founder, illustrates what this means. He worked on
behalf of one unidentified Republican presidential candidate, serving online
ads in the Miami-Dade region of Florida specifically to 400,000 individuals who
had voted in at least two of the four previous Republican primaries. The
adverts were further customised for gender, and for Spanish speaking.
They were
distributed to the individuals through internet ad exchanges that allow for
instantaneous filtering of users the nanosecond they click onto a video on any
one of four million websites. In that flash, if you fitted the criterion you
were served with a 30-second pre-roll video from the candidate delivering a
message to you that you would have found remarkably personal.
"I'm
sure this is the future of digital political campaigning," said
CampaignGrid's CEO Jeff Dittus.
Drew
Brighton, CEO of TargetSmart Communications, is hoping to do the same
hyper-targeting for Democratic and progressive politicians and causes through
his new product Target Blue. It matches up the details of up to 50m cookies
embedded on individual computers with voter files and uses it to identify
Democratic-leaning individuals to whom it can serve customised ads wherever
they go on the web.
The company
is also developing a system for targeting Democratic voters through their
computer IP addresses down to such tightly drawn areas or "IP zones"
as just 20 households. That allows for micro-targeting depending on the average
income bracket, age profile and concerns of that tiny locality.
The
elephant in the room, of course, is television, which continues to dominate
advertising spending by political campaigns. Most analysts agree that 2012 has
come too soon for any equally transformative leaps forward in targeted or
"addressable" TV advertising.
Cable
television can close in on geographic zones ranging from a few thousand to up
to 100,000 viewers allowing campaigns to shape their messages to those
clusters. The tighter the geographical area that can be drawn, the more
efficient the TV advertising becomes as campaign managers can focus on
primarily-Democratic, Republican or independent neighbourhoods.
But its
still a relatively blunt instrument. The prize would be to be able to fuse
cable subscriptions with voter files so that TV adverts could be sent to
households of a specific political persuasion.
Technically,
that's already possible. Comcast Spotlight, the advertising arm of Comcast
Cable, has run trials of commercial as opposed to political addressable
advertising in Baltimore. Adverts custom-made to speak to various demographic
groups were piped into 60,000 identified households, though the personal
details were removed to protect privacy. The results confirmed the power of the
technology: homes receiving addressable adverts tuned away a third less of the
time than homes receiving untargeted commercials.
Dan
Sinagoga, who specialises in political advertising at Comcast Spotlight, says
that all advertisers, but political ones in particular, "would like to be
doing addressable advertising yesterday". But he said it was unlikely to
happen in any great quantity in 2012 as there are too many hurdles, including
concerns in Washington about the privacy of cable TV consumers.
No such
impediment will hold back the digital explosion this year. As an Obama insider
puts it: "Give us less wood, and we'll make more fire."
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