Writing in June 2013, I was looking back at an election cycle that meant big business for the ad industry. The original article cited the Center for Responsive Politics for an estimate of roughly $6 billion spent across media during the 2012 election and described that cycle as the most expensive to that point.
As the nation began looking toward 2016, I believed the role of big data and social data in influencing election decisions could not be ignored. I saw social media as a major force in 2008 and data-driven campaigning as a major force in 2012. My prediction was that the combination would play a decisive role in 2016.
Back in 2008, online social impact was still in its infancy and while people flocked to social channels like Facebook and Twitter to share their thoughts and influence others, there was not yet a way to measure impact beyond overall sentiment. Social media was akin to guerrilla marketing, and yet these tools were extremely influential in giving people a voice in the policies being discussed that swayed the outcome of the election. People wanted change and were not afraid to share their opinions in public conversations, and the global discussion encouraged others to step into the polling booth to cast their ballots.
It’s a Numbers Game
2012 showcased the rise of political data science and big data, how campaign managers and pollsters gathered public opinions about each candidate, compared this with state-by-state election data and wove all the pieces into a comprehensive political campaign for each party. What social media was to 2008, data-driven campaigning was in 2012. Math quants and data crushers were able to disseminate the mounds of campaign data at their fingertips into actionable targeting information to persuade prospective voters across the nation, and within strategic swing states.
As an example of the 2012 focus on numbers, the original article pointed to the 7.9 percent unemployment rate reported shortly before the election. Campaigns could take a national statistic like that, place it inside a broader economic argument, and use it to reinforce the story they wanted voters to remember.
As Wired reported at the time, Barack Obama’s campaign had cemented the role of data in the campaigning process. His ultimate success came from the work of historic get-out-the-vote efforts dominated by targeted messaging and digital behavioral tracking. Savvy campaigns of the future will build off this success and spread these approaches to every part of the electoral process, continually accumulating whatever new types of data are available in the future.
Big Data + Social Data = Your Next President
What I believed the big-data equation was missing was the combined impact of social influence, mobile data, and CRM assets when campaigns could use them quickly and effectively. Data-driven marketing was reducing some of the guessing in advertising, and technologies such as hashtag targeting were creating new links between earned media, including tweets and social sharing, and paid display campaigns.
During the 2012 election, voters could encounter Obama and Romney campaign ads repeatedly through retargeting technologies. You may have noticed that Romney ads started popping up in your browser just because you visited his website once to pull a stat. This was due to the custom ad targeting browser tools the candidates used or built to harvest data, but this is only the beginning of what emerging technologies are able to do.
Big data algorithms allow advertisers and political managers to better target consumers online based on their social interactions across the Web and on Facebook. It uses this important social data, along with mobile geolocation data and CRM data, to fuel display ad campaigns delivered online, via mobile, video and Facebook.
Every like, share, and mobile interaction was adding to the volume of data available to campaigns and advertisers. Campaign managers and brand advertisers were finding new ways to sort through that data as audiences moved among computers, phones, tablets, and other touch points.
Social data was changing how advertisers approached marketing. By 2013, campaigns could track far more online behavior than impression and conversion metrics alone had captured five years earlier. That was the wager behind this 2013 prediction: the blend of social data, large campaign data sets, mobile signals, and targeting would become central to how the 2016 presidential race was fought. It was a forecast about campaign influence, not a guarantee that data alone would determine the winner.
