Taking their lead from some of the best US campaigns, parties have been making extensive use of polling, local intelligence from voters, and additional useful information like consumer data, to produce
microtargeted campaigns to raise turnout amongst specific groups in target seats.
But a successful
microtargeting campaign might have a 5 to 10 percent conversion rate at best, which means that 90 to 95 percent of your targets aren't going to buy from you despite being your perfect potential customer.
Not exact matches
For instance, Romney's
campaign talked a lot about
microtargeted communications, but they seem to have had in mind reaching out to the same pool of voters as usual but with better messaging.
He has more about MySpace - based
microtargeting and a mention of MySpace's voter registration
campaign in this Future Majority post.
But
microtargeting has the potential to help with more than just the last - minute turnout frenzy, since
campaigns can use consumer information databases to zero - in on and recruit supporters long before the actual election.
They talk about database - driven
microtargeting, for one thing, along with the importance of
campaigns» going where the audience is.
In the video below, Aiden and I touch on a ton of good topics, including the power of data for
microtargeting in general, for cookie - based voter - file targeting, for multi-variant email fundraising
campaigns and for tracking supporter actions, including social sharing.
And the fact that Trump calls it that suggests he has no earthly idea what data mining,
microtargeting and the thousands of other ways that data can inform
campaign decisions actually are or do.
«
Microtargeting» was the buzzword, but data was the result: weeks ago hard numbers made the
campaign «cautiously confident» that the race was trending in their favor, based on what they knew about the voters who had yet to make up their minds.
But there is no contradiction in that statement and by also saying that
campaigns should spend as much as they possibly can on polling, data analysis and
microtargeting tools.
And while the Democratic Congressional
Campaign Committee has also been using mobile
microtargeting programs, as well as working with Google AdWords to target ads geographically, its record - breaking fund - raising is perhaps most impressive.
We show here that
microtargeting, like President Obama's
campaign put in practice in 2012, is now affordable in smaller - budget and down - ballot races.
In the 2014 cycle, GOP congressional
campaigns and conservative - leaning groups paid at least $ 729,000 to the firm for a range of services, including research, data analytics and
microtargeting.
While the RNC was fine - tuning its «
microtargeting» program in Rhode Island, Democrats were announcing they had finally resolved a months - long dispute between Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean and Democratic Congressional
Campaign Committee Chairman Rahm Emanuel (Ill.) over a budget for mobilizing voters.
D: The
campaign also
microtargeted voters by firing off emails or posting messages on Facebook that were shaped to appeal to their particular interests or causes using tracking software, similar to ones used by online retailers to craft ads.
Cambridge Analytica has quickly grown into one of the world's leading political data firms, using psychological profiling to build award winning behavioral
microtargeting tools for political and commercial marketing
campaigns globally.
Behavioral techniques,
microtargeting, and data analysis are not new to political
campaigns, as Sasha Issenberg has shown in The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning
Campaigns (2012).
There, with the help of a Canadian company called Aggregate IQ, which was also instrumental in analyzing voter data for the Brexit
campaigns in support of the U.K.'s departure from the European Union, SCL set up a data
microtargeting program for the ruling party at the time, United National Congress.
So sophisticated was Obama's
microtargeting operation — based mostly in Chicago — that Sasha Issenberg could write in the MIT Technology Review that the
campaign already knew the names of most of the people who had voted for Obama in 2008.
Social media companies — Facebook, Twitter, Google, Snapchat, YouTube and others — have been
microtargeting users with millions of specific advertisements, images, videos and other elements that are aimed at driving engagement, argue the
campaign's backers, led by CHT Executive Director Tristan...
Another document in the bundle published today details a project pitch by SCL to carry out $ 200,000 worth of
microtargeting and political
campaign work for the conservative organization ForAmerica.org — for «audience building and supporter mobilization
campaigns».
Social media companies — Facebook, Twitter, Google, Snapchat, YouTube and others — have been
microtargeting users with millions of specific advertisements, images, videos and other elements that are aimed at driving engagement, argue the
campaign's backers, led by CHT Executive Director Tristan Harris, former design ethicist at Google.
In this first installment of «The AIQ Files,» we take a closer look at the suite of political data and
microtargeting tools possessed by AggregateIQ and exposed in this data repository - in turn revealing the inner workings of the kind of influencing prowess in which Cambridge Analytica claimed expertise, to the
campaigns of customers like Ted Cruz, Ben Carson, and Donald Trump.
Obama's 2008
campaign was famously data - driven, pioneered
microtargeting in 2012, talking to people specifically based on the issues they care about.