
Pandora Knows if You Are a Republican - rmason
http://online.wsj.com/news/article_email/SB10001424052702304315004579381393567130078-lMyQjAxMTA0MDEwMzExNDMyWj
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unoti
Sure. Pandora also thinks I'm Mexican, and has been playing ads to me in
Spanish ever since the day I listened to a couple of awesome Flemenco guitar
songs.

~~~
walshemj
That's nothing in the UK yahoo seems to think I come from India and keeps
showing me Indian matrimonial arranged marriage sites.

~~~
camus2
Yeah,for me it's muslim dating ads. At least they are not trying to guess your
religion ;)

~~~
MaysonL
Hey, Google used to show me bow resin ads after I subscribed to cello-dev
(about a Common Lisp library).

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aresant
I accidentally burned some cycles in the world of political marketing and it
is incredibly rigid.

The general approach is spend your money to get KNOWN party voters back to the
polls.

EG - make sure known republicans:

(a) know you are the republican candidate

(b) get to the polls

And if you read the article Pandora is effectively leveraging a very boring,
unoriginal approach to political marketing wrapped in great PR:

"Pandora's inferences start with a user's ZIP Code, supplied at registration.
So if 80% of citizens in a certain county voted for President Obama in 2012,
Pandora assumes that 80% of people in the ZIP Codes in that county "lean
Democrat." If the county voted twice for Obama, the algorithm pegs users in
those ZIP Codes as likely to be "strong Democrats."

Then there's some sprinkled in "algorithmic" work around user music
preference.

Which really I bet that buyers won't care that much about as they're too
afraid of missing any known voters to want to take a risk on micro-targeting.

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valarauca1
Pandora still hasn't correctly nailed down my musical taste despite nearly 2
years of continuous usage. How are they going to guess my political party
affiliations correctly?

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RyanZAG
Blue or Red isn't really a difficult decision to make. If you flip a coin
you're already 50% likely to be correct. Musical taste is much much harder.

~~~
freehunter
For me personally, I've completely quit using Pandora because every station I
try to make ends up playing Top 40 pop music. At least Last.FM sticks to the
genre I've put in, Pandora seems to try to steer me to listen to songs they
want me to listen to. Really annoying when I start listening to Americana and
classic country and end up with Drake several hours later.

~~~
ycmike
All roads lead to Drake and Ke$ha.

~~~
valarauca1
Timber!

~~~
ycmike
That too!

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nswanberg
This is way more interesting than party affiliation (which I bet is largely
based on cultural affiliation, not policy preferences): "He says that people
within higher-income brackets have more eclectic musical tastes than others."

I can see that possibly being true but has anyone seen studies on this? Is the
correlation between income and diverse music tastes very strong?

~~~
bendoernberg
You may enjoy the 1996 paper "Changing Highbrow Tastes: From Snob to Omnivore"
[http://www-personal.umich.edu/~lundyj/New%20College%20Class/...](http://www-
personal.umich.edu/~lundyj/New%20College%20Class/Readings/Peterson%20and%20Kern_From%20Snob%20to%20Omnivore.pdf)

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daveslash
The people who hang out here on HN probably have more complexity to their
personalities than your "average Joe/Jane". We're probably the outliers to the
statistical model - and my guess is that we'd all be surprised how accurate
Pandora's insights are for the general public.

~~~
protomyth
> The people who hang out here on HN probably have more complexity to their
> personalities than your "average Joe/Jane"

I think that statement is a load of crap and elitist. You're not more complex
than the rest, you just gloss over their complexity since it is not in your
frame of reference.

~~~
hnriot
so do I!! Wow, I would likely argue quite the opposite is true, hackers are
generally deficient in many other areas. Complexity comes in many forms, and
just having an affinity for highly deterministic systems (computers) is likely
a feature vector of diminished complexity. But very likely that's also crap.

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rmason
I am willing to bet they don't know my voting preferences solely from the
music I listen to on a regular basis. I think the story is wrong, they must be
using other data if their predictions are accurate.

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al2o3cr
Up next from WSJ's crack "Shit We Should Have Already Known About" research
team: "HOLY FUCKBALLS, Your Credit Card Company Knows STUFF About You!"

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sliverstorm
Joke's on them, I listen to country and electronic... I wonder what they will
make of that.

~~~
wmeredith
I thought this was odd, because I'm not a Republican or a Democrat. The
headline of this article is a nice outline of the obnoxious presumptuousness
pervasive in the marketing industry that got me to leave it.

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MSM
> " Mr. Krawczyk said he believes Pandora's predictions are between 75% and
> 80% accurate"

This doesn't really seem noteworthy at all. I would be interested to know on a
national level, percentage-wise what the average majority of each county
votes.

I don't know how to word that better unfortunately, so here's an example: If
we have three counties with equal population and one votes 81% republican,
another 71% republican and the third 88% democrat, I would be able to
determine your voting preferences by county alone with ~80% correctness. I
know some states are swing states, but I think that a lot of those counties
are still strong in one direction.

Anyone know where this data might exist just for kicks?

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jaredsohn
This map shows the voting percentage from the last election for the House of
Representatives for each county.

[http://s1131.photobucket.com/user/swolf318/media/Political%2...](http://s1131.photobucket.com/user/swolf318/media/Political%20Geography/UnitedStatesHouseofRepresentativesElection2012byCounty_zps37885a7f.png.html)

~~~
MSM
Thanks! Managed to find a raw data source, added a reply to myself.

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madcaptenor
They don't _know_ your voting preferences, so the headline is a bit
misleading. But they don't need to know them for sure; they just need to be
able to guess them better than other ad providers.

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scottu1
I think Pandora is just going to push a bunch of potential customers away if
they start delivering political ads. Most people have lost trust in both
parties and don't want to hear it.

Well I just heard a Keystone pipeline ad that asked me to call a Congressman
or the President or something. Guess it's already going on.

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bitwize
Not news. The companies that run analytics for the cable companies and movie
studios know your age, race, gender, education and income level, just from the
shows you watch. D vs. R is trivial to figure out.

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alecco
"The Cloud" is getting creepy.

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trhway
no surprise. Even adult video industry knows if you're a Republican and sells
this data to the marketers in "normal" channels

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cesarbs
Pandora thinks I'm single (I'm not).

