Dollarocracy (44 page)

What, exactly, did the Obama campaign do to win such accolades? It began by using cookies to collect immense amounts of data online.
BarackObama.com
, for example, included eighty-seven different tracking cookies dropped surreptitiously on visitors; that is even more than on the Best Buy Web site.
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Cookies were planted, for example, to see if individuals visited religious or erotic Web sites.
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DSPolitical, a Democratic strategy group, for example, aggregated more than 600 million cookies.
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“They know everything Google and Facebook know about you,” an Obama campaign “data-miner” said about his colleagues. “They know what music you like, which Harry Potter book is your favorite, your voting habits, etc.”
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The Obama team then integrated into the database all the vast information the campaign had assembled on voters from polling, e-mail lists, fund-raisers, mobile contacts, and millions of in-person visits and telephone calls.
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This included the material from 2 million volunteers who interviewed more than 24 million voters.
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The database was continually updated in real time.

The campaign then matched these data to publicly available voter rolls that by law have all been digitized.
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The campaign also spent millions to purchase
“data points” from commercial data warehouses, generally offline matters such as voters' shopping histories, financial problems, and dating preferences. (There are seven companies that advertise their ability to help campaigns target specific voters online.)
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Thanks to digital technology, there is now “unprecedented access to information about voters.”
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Sasha Issenberg said the great breakthrough in 2012 was “linking a person's offline political identity with their online presence.” Both presidential campaigns had on average around one thousand data points on each voter.
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Strategists affiliated with the campaigns acknowledged they had “access to information about the personal lives of voters never before imagined.”
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Whereas much of commercial online data collection tends to keep the actual identities of computer users anonymous—because advertisers target users by demographic criteria that do not require knowing the precise identity—political campaigns had every incentive to know who exactly was connected to the online profiles and where exactly they lived. There was no such thing as “too much information.”

This is where the fun begins. As
The Economist
put it, “The point of all these data is to mine them for insights into the electorate and identify pockets of voters who can be won over—either to vote, spend or volunteer.”
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Ghani's team plumbed the data for “motivations, attitudes, and protestations.”
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As
Bloomberg Businessweek
described it, the “campaign's Orwellian knowledge of the electorate—its deep understanding of precisely what, or whom, would motivate someone to act on Obama's behalf—was such that it could get supporters to appeal to wavering or unreliable friends and acquaintances with individually tailored messages.”
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The Obama team took the data to predict “which types of people would be persuaded by certain kinds of appeals.”
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It created an “optimizer” that was able to crunch all the data to create a new rating system for all Americans based on their likelihood of being an Obama voter.
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The data-miners created support scores “for every single voter in battleground states,” Messina explained after the election, on a scale of “1 to 100, on whether they would support us.”
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This gave them a far superior means to evaluate where and how resources would be best deployed.

Even more importantly, the Obama campaign used its computer power to test and retest and retest again messages to see what worked best with specific sets of individuals and with individuals themselves. It developed the unprecedented “targeted-sharing program”—what Messina termed its “true
innovation”—which would determine which person should contact another person to get that person to vote for Obama and precisely what type of message would be most effective. “People really trust their friends, not political advertising,” Obama campaign digital director Teddy Goff said. Goff's team provided people with all the “high-quality, shareable content” they needed to be “effective ambassadors for the campaign.” The material the campaign gave its workers was basically idiot-proof.
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The Obama campaign was able to use targeted sharing on 85 percent of its turnout targets aged twenty-nine and under, largely through Facebook, which was used to reach 5 million such prospects. “What businesses find so tantalizing about the Obama campaign is that it has advanced this phenomenon to its next iteration,”
Bloomberg Businessweek
noted. “Your friend isn't just raving about Pepsi; he's telling you, in language and images likely to resonate with you, that you should be drinking Pepsi, too.”
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The significance of this observation cannot be underestimated, as it offers deep perspective on the extent to which the civic and democratic values that ought to underpin our politics are being replaced by commercial and entertainment values—so much so that businesses now emulate campaigns. We have come full circle from the days when Adlai Stevenson said in 1956, “The idea that you can merchandise candidates for high office like breakfast cereal is the ultimate indignity to the democratic process.”
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Now the folks who sell breakfast cereal are taking marketing cues from the folks who do politics.

The Obama campaign also created “Dashboard,” a hierarchical social network, which kept the millions of volunteers on the ground in constant touch with the data center via their smartphones. The data was updated in real time, and volunteers were instantly being redirected to better uses of their time and labor. Volunteers could track their performance against that of their peers, “and the campaign could measure the performance of its field operation in real time.” As Messina put it, this meant 30,000 volunteer “neighborhood team leaders” had the effectiveness of full-time paid staffers.
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In short, as Messina intended, these data drove everything in the campaign. It used the “optimizer” data to drive TV advertising purchases, which is a reason the campaign spent heavily for spots on cable TV entertainment reruns compared to the Romney or any other campaign.
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These data were also the driving force in the striking success of the Obama fund-raising effort, which
floundered through the first half of 2012, at least with the small donors who had provided so much money for the 2008 campaign.
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Then, as one campaign senior official put it, fund-raising over “the Internet exploded over the summer,” blasting through the campaign's already ambitious goals.
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How did the campaign do this? Mostly through e-mail solicitations that on the surface struck many on the Obama team as far too casual or even creepy. The Obama team was shocked that all its predictions about what would be successful e-mail fund-raising appeals were shown by testing to be so ineffective. Drawing on the banks of data, a staff of twenty e-mail writers tested extensively and then fine-tuned the winning e-mails. “When we saw something that really moved the dial,” the campaign's e-mail director said, “we would adopt it.”
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The final tally: “$690 million raised online, up from $500 million in 2008.”
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Likewise, after detailed study and a redesign, the Obama campaign generated 1.5 million “one-click” donors, often through cell phone texts, who gave $115 million, about $75 million more than had been expected.
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The campaign database also provided the direction for the get-out-the-vote drive that was so singularly successful.
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It was able to “train voters to go to the polls through subtle cues, rewards and threats in a manner akin to the marketing efforts of credit card companies and big-box retailers.”
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“We knew exactly who we had to go get,” Messina said, “and that's how we got the turnout numbers that mattered.” The campaign turned out “key demographic blocks in astonishing numbers.” Consider Ohio, where African Americans accounted for 15 percent of the electorate in 2012, compared to 11 percent in 2008. That was 200,000 more new African American voters in a state Obama won with a 165,000-vote margin. Tim Dickinson noted that Romney's digital tool to monitor turnout, Orca, on the other hand, “was never properly tested and failed disastrously in the crunch.”
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The lesson of 2012 was summed up by reporter Molly McHugh: “No interested candidate is going to see this campaign and not want to replicate what the Obama team was able to do by taking the mountains of information the Internet holds and turn it into deliverables.” “Everyone will jump on the data train,” ElectNext CEO Keya Dannenbaum said after the election. “Much like Obama pioneered campaigning on social media and now all politicians are there, so too it will be with big data.”
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Or as Kantar Media president Ken Goldstein put it, “Future campaigns ignore the targeting strategy of the
Obama campaign of 2012 at their peril.”
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This is the next stop on the path of the money-and-media election complex.

At this point, the ethical and social implications of the digital transformation of campaigns are still mostly unexplored. It is a world where the guiding principle is, as Ghani put it, “Will it get me more votes? If not, I don't care.”
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For some insiders, the seamy underside of digital data collection and microtargeting may be better left unsaid. “These are the kinds of things that I think smart people would keep to themselves,” an interactive political consultant said.
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The process may be getting to the point where it cannot be ignored. An ad executive with experience on Republican campaigns provided a sober assessment: “They are tactics that are pretty standard in marketing, but they are nonetheless ‘Orwellian.' Those of us who've read
1984
look at this and say, ‘This is unbelievable.'”
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Nor should Democrats regard the digital transformation as not especially problematic because their guy won. Recall from
Chapter 4
when David Broder interviewed LBJ staffers after their landslide election victory in 1964. Broder noted the “lip-smacking glee” they exhibited at how the revolutionary Daisy TV ad “had foisted on the American public a picture of Barry Goldwater as the nuclear-mad bomber who was going to saw off the eastern seaboard of the United States.” “The only thing that worries me, Dave,” one of the staffers confided to Broder, “is that some year an outfit as good as ours might go to work for the wrong candidate.”
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Without our even broaching the topic of digital political advertising, the importance of the Internet to the present and future of campaigns is clear. As we turn to it now, the importance mushrooms and the ethical and political problems associated with the Internet also become clearer. In 2012, political advertising gave a taste of what is to come. By Election Day, the ad-search firm Moat determined that Obama had produced 657 digital display ads, whereas Romney had done 112.
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To some extent, this advertising, and the advertising for other candidates, was simply a posting of the spots (or variations of spots) also shown on television, with the hope of reinforcing the campaign message and enhancing the effect. The idea was to “hammer their message.”
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By 2012, digital was part of the ad mix for a campaign. “You
should never do one
or
the other,” the chief digital officer at WPP's GroupM media buying unit said.
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A Nielsen study (sponsored by Google) found that running advertising across TV, computers, tablets, and mobile phones “increased the amount of key information viewers retained from 22 percent with TV-only ads to 39 percent.”
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“The most natural starting point is take your ads . . . and put them online,” said Andrew Roos, who worked on political ad sales for Google.
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But it was also a lot more than that. Internet political advertising has a different logic. Colin Hanna of the conservative Let Freedom Ring PAC shifted much of its money from television to online. “We're doing it the opposite way,” he explained. “We're buying the audience.”
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Issenberg explained what this means: “It's an incredible tool. If I'm a campaign manager in Ohio and have a list of 100,000 voters I want to remind of the auto-bailout, say, in the past I could send direct mail or get volunteers to phone them. Now I can give a list to the person who buys web ads and they will unfurl a small banner ad at just the person you want to see it.”
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Writer Jeffrey Rosen got a taste of this during the 2012 campaign when he cleared the cookies off his computer and launched two distinct identities on two different Web browsers, one for a “Democratic Jeff” and the other for a “Republican Jeff.” He created new distinct partisan digital identities “as heavy-handedly as possible,” with Democratic Jeff visiting Obama and liberal sites and Republican Jeff doing the opposite. Then when he returned to what had been his favorite Web sites, he got completely different political advertising on the sites he visited depending upon which browser he was using. And the political ads would follow him wherever he went around the Web.
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