How the Presidential Candidates Track Their Supporters | Hacker News Reader

How the Presidential Candidates Track Their Supporters

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41 pointselbac8 comments

Disclaimer: Not a political statement, just hypothetical and simplified observations on the use and efficacy of digital technology employed by election campaigns.

The prevailing narrative has been that data and analytics has powered a more effective ground game and digital strategy for recent candidates often giving them the edge (Obama).

It's safe to assume that Hillary Clinton's campaign has the most (winning) experience and resources in this respect as she inherited many of the operatives from the Obama camp.

For this reason, it would be really interesting if Hillary ended up losing the nomination. It would signal what we already know which is that there is some limit to marketing and advertising.

Voters/consumers often discern the difference between the candidate/product as it actually is and the perceptions of the candidate/product that the advertising campaign attempts to manufacture.

Especially for younger generations, people are increasingly immune not only to the content of advertisements but also to the tracking technologies utilized to effectively deliver those advertisements.

It will be interesting to see how these trends play out (increased reliance of campaigns on digital advertising and increased immunity to ads by younger generations).

You are asking the interesting question. I have nothing to add.

I think this will be a very interesting question even if she ultimately wins as she's certainly had a tough time given her resources.

Personally, I don't believe people are building direct immunity. I think they are updating their self image to avoid cognitive dissonance which leads to identity confusions, like the shocking number of people I meet who seem to think they are in all sorts of long tails when they seem quite average.

As such, I do think quantitative based analytics will eventually win out. But not in terms of direct targeting ads to the correct voter. I think broadcast (or pseudo broadcast) ads are essential and the sophistication will be in analyzing the social affects and trying to do this in smaller tests without "using them up". I.e. eliciting bad defenses from an opponents supporters on twitter is far more powerful than randomly bringing up points privately to the independents you are after. In the first case, we are all forced to cement an argument if only to clarify why we think someone is an idiot.

I have some personal experience here. Worked with the 2008 and 2012 Obama campaigns and knew a few guys in the "Cave" (their analytics and big data initiatives that helped direct strategy) The biggest thing to remember is that ultimately the big decisions and spends are made by leadership. Their emphasis, hiring, and personal relationship to the teams crunching the numbers, suggesting policy and strategy based on those numbers, and building the tools is what makes a difference.

My guess would be Hillary has a lot more of her team coming from the DNC than former Obama staffers and that its far too soon to make a judgement about the cohesion and effectiveness of her digital strategy operation at this point. There won't be much ramp up on that front until after the primaries. Its probably a skeleton crew right now.

From http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/dec/11/senator-ted-c...

"... used Amazon’s crowdsourcing marketplace Mechanical Turk (MTurk) to access a large pool of Facebook profiles, hoovering up tens of thousands of individuals’ demographic data – names, locations, birthdays, genders – as well as their Facebook “likes”, which offer a range of personal insights ... For every individual recruited on MTurk, he harvested information about their friends , meaning the dataset ballooned significantly in size ... users had an average of around 340 friends ... the Facebook data was then used to generate sophisticated models of each of their personalities using the so-called “big five” personality traits and characteristics – openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism."

From http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/features/2015-11-12/is-the...

"... “This is really trying to use psychology to understand why hostile audiences do what they do, and to use this methodology to deconstruct that behavior and then use communication to try and change attitudes and ultimately behavior,” Nix says. “Persuading somebody to vote in a certain way,” he goes on, “is really very similar to persuading 14- to 25-year-old boys in Indonesia to not join Al Qaeda.”

Interesting how few are using Twitter advertising, I assume they all have twitter accounts and would otherwise be active there.

I wonder if that speaks to the general issue that Twitter has had in terms of being an effective advertising platform - either in terms of targeting capability or demographics of the userbase.

If even the candidates who are spending money like it's going out of style aren't even using it...

In my experience, Twitter advertising just doesn't work so well. The specs are difficult to design around (and there's a lot of different requirements for different types of ads) and the performance just isn't as good as Facebook or Google ads.

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