latest abney and associates technology news Google's Eric Schmidt Invests in Obama's Big Data Brains
During the 2012 campaign, Barack Obama’s reelection team had an underappreciated asset: Google’s (GOOG) executive chairman, Eric Schmidt. He helped recruit talent, choose technology, and coach the campaign manager, Jim Messina, on the finer points of leading a large organization. “On election night he was in our boiler room in Chicago,” says David Plouffe, then a senior White House adviser. Schmidt had a particular affinity for a group of engineers and statisticians tucked away beneath a disco ball in a darkened corner of the office known as “the Cave.”
The data analytics team, led by 30-year-old Dan Wagner, is credited with producing Obama’s surprising 5 million-vote margin of victory.
For all its acclaim, the analytics team’s main achievement is often misunderstood as “microtargeting” or some variant on wooing voters. This reverses the relationship between campaign and voter at the heart of Wagner’s method. Recent campaigns have employed a top-down approach to identify what they thought were vital demographic groups such as “soccer moms.” Wagner’s team pursued a bottom-up strategy of unifying vast commercial and political databases to understand the proclivities of individual voters likely to support Obama or be open to his message, and then sought to persuade them through personalized contact via Facebook (FB), e-mail, or a knock on the door. “I think of them as people scientists,’’ says Schmidt. “They apply scientific techniques to how people will behave when confronted with a choice or a question.” Obama’s rout of Mitt Romney was a lesson in how this insight can translate into political strength.
Traditional marketing has the same inherent limitation as traditional campaigning: It’s impossible to appeal to everybody, even among the groups likeliest to favor a product. “Budweiser might target football fans with an ad showing half-naked women jumping up and down with a bottle of beer,” says M. Eric Johnson, director of the Center for Digital Strategies at Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business. “They’re trying to build something that appeals to a huge segment of people. It may be the right segment. But they know they’re losing a bunch of people, who either won’t like the ad or won’t be persuaded by it.” Analytics offers the potential of capturing these people, too.
“Big Data gives you the ability to personalize,” says Johnson, “to know me well enough to understand that, while I like beer, I don’t want to see half-naked women jumping around with a can of Bud.”
Wagner took an unlikely route to the Cave. In 2007 he was volunteering at Obama’s Chicago headquarters as an organizer of phone banks targeting Latino voters. As a hobby, he built a special calculator for caucuses that could determine how many voters a candidate would need to take from a rival to gain an additional delegate. “It was essentially a game-theory application designed for use in the Iowa caucus,” he says.
Wagner showed his creation to some colleagues and shortly after was summoned to the office of the campaign’s Illinois director, Jon Carson. “This is very interesting,” Carson recalls telling him. “How soon can you move to Iowa?
Can you go in three days?” Wagner spent the remainder of the primary season traveling from state to state and led the voter targeting effort in the Midwest during the 2008 general election. He later went to work for the Democratic National Committee, where his team accurately forecast the Democrats’ blowout loss in the 2010 midterm elections.
By the time Wagner signed on as chief analytics officer for Obama’s 2012 campaign, it was clear Big Data would be central to the reelection strategy. Along with identifying potential supporters, Wagner’s team built intricate mathematical models of swing states that provided an alternative to traditional polls. “Those guys were our bible,” says Plouffe. “They consistently told us what was really going on.” During the final month, the campaign’s internal tracking polls of Ohio, a pivotal swing state, suddenly grew erratic; one night Obama would be up four, the next down by one. “There were people in the campaign completely wigging out,” Plouffe says. Wagner’s model, by contrast, showed a steady three- to four-point lead for Obama that proved accurate.
Schmidt’s introduction to Wagner didn’t seem likely to lead to a business collaboration. Each day at 4:30 p.m., to let off steam, the Cave’s inhabitants would flip off the lights, fire up the disco ball, and spend five minutes dancing to a mash-up of Psy’s Gangnam Style and a campaign robocall voiced in a dulcet baritone by Wagner’s deputy, Andrew Claster. Schmidt showed up to meet Wagner just as “Club Claster” was kicking off. No stranger to creative eccentricity, he was unfazed, and when the campaign ended, he agreed to keep the party going.
latest abney and associates technology news Google's Eric Schmidt Invests in Obama's Big Data Brains
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