
How the Presidential Candidates Track Their Supporters - elbac
https://www.indicative.com/how-the-presidential-candidates-spy-on-their-supporters/
======
chishaku
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).

~~~
letitleak
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.

------
walterbell
From [http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/dec/11/senator-
ted-c...](http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/dec/11/senator-ted-cruz-
president-campaign-facebook-user-data)

 _"... 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...](http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/features/2015-11-12/is-the-
republican-party-s-killer-data-app-for-real-)

 _"... “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.”_

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

~~~
mblevin
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...

