Dollarocracy (45 page)

What Rosen experienced is just the first stage of how campaigns can microtarget spots to specific individuals. By 2012, microtargeting joined the political lexicon as it became the “predominant means of delivering political messages online,” according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), a trade association for the commercial Internet. The IAB surveyed campaign strategists, and
all
of them said they were using microtargeting. “We didn't set out to ask only about microtargeting—it just came up so much. . . . It popped,” said Sherrill Mane of the IAB.
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“Political campaigns now for the first time can actually reach out to prospective voters with messaging that addresses
each person's
specific interests and causes,” the IAB report noted.
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This microtargeting also includes the ability to “target advertisements to mobile phones and tablets based on location.”
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“Geo-targeting,” as this is termed, “can target by interest, location, mobile access device,” Twitter's head of political ad sales explained. “It's pretty remarkable how minutely we can target.” Moreover, a campaign can identify how many clicks an ad gets and how long a viewer watches one of its videos.
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This provides the sort of data that allows a campaign like Obama's with supercomputer firepower at its beck and call to continually refine its messages until it gets to exactly what buttons to push with each individual voter. “So if it sounds like candidates are actually speaking to
you
,” digital marketing expert Andy Ellenthal wrote, “well, they are.”
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This also tends to merge with the pattern of a person delivering a specific ad message to a friend on behalf of the campaign, because then the recipient “will take it more seriously.”
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In short, in combination this represents what Kantar Media's Goldstein termed “a sea change in political advertising.”
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There is one additional aspect of digital political advertising that is particularly delicious to campaigns. A crucial problem for TV political ads in the era of DVRs and remote controls is that people can and do easily avoid them. “The big problem for advertisers these days is that everyone is fast-forwarding through their video,” Jim Walsh of the Democratic DSPolitical explained. The digital solution to this problem is the rapid emergence of “pre-roll video ads” that cannot be skipped if users wish to see video clips on popular sites like ESPN, YouTube, or Hulu. Pre-roll “is great stuff,” Walsh enthused, because it “forces you to watch it [the ad] before you get your content.”
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“It's those 30 seconds you can't get rid of,” a freshman at George Mason University explained to a
Los Angeles Times
reporter.
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Let Freedom Ring's 2012 work on behalf of Mitt Romney provides some sense of how all this is beginning to crystallize. Hanna's group created forty video ads that were custom tailored to 16 million swing voters broken into twenty-four groups, such as independent young women, Hispanic business owners, Israel supporters, and affluent seniors. “People who fall into these different categories can open the same Web page and see different pro-Romney ads—or none, if they don't vote or are considered too diehard to be worth persuading,” the
Philadelphia Inquirer
reported. “As of today we have served 150 million 30-second videos,” Hanna told the
Inquirer
just before the election.
Two-thirds of the viewers watched the ads all the way through, because they were mostly pre-roll ads installed at the beginning of popular videos, such as ESPN's NFL replays. Only a person included in the 16 million targets would see a “pre-roll” Romney ad when going to a video at, say,
ESPN.com
, and which specific ad that person would get would depend upon which of the twenty-four groups he or she was placed in. Visitors to
ESPN.com
who were not in the Romney target audience would get a commercial ad for a product like Chevy. And in the online world, advertisers pay only for ads that are viewed.
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To hear advertising industry representatives talk about it, microtargeting political ads based on surreptitious gathering of data is the greatest thing since sliced bread. “These technologies provide a method for politicians inexpensively to improve our democracy,” a lawyer for the Digital Advertising Alliance, an industry group, said. “I would say the founding fathers firmly believed in the ability—and I think our society very much values the ability—to efficiently reach a desired audience with a political message.”
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Who can complain? After all, advertisers will target you only if they think you have an interest in the product, so no more ads for products you have no interest in. Perhaps this explains why a Toluna survey found Internet advertising was ranked by voters as about as “enjoyable” as newspaper and radio political advertising and far more “enjoyable” than TV political ads or the dreaded robocalls. (The survey found, “to no one's surprise, that most respondents do have a negative view of political advertising overall,” so this was hardly a ringing endorsement.)
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To some extent, this preference for Internet political ads over their TV variant also may be because digital political advertising in 2012 tended to be more positive than the spots found on TV. It was where campaigns spoke to their own voters and attempted to rouse them. The emphasis was “to mine reams of data about constituents to precisely target ads to loyalists and people most likely to be receptive to their messages,” Emily Steel wrote in the
Financial Times
. “Women likely to be concerned about abortion rights were likely to see a different set of ads than people worried about global warming, for instance.”
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Obama's digital director Goff said social media, in particular, provided a “whole different campaign,” in contrast to the relentless negativity of the TV ad war. The Internet was used for “uplifting stuff”; it was full of
positive messages about supporting the middle class and fighting for education. The Internet was the good cop.
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In addition, the relatively positive response to Internet political ads may have been due to their being largely voluntary and easy to skip, except for the pre-roll spots. And by the end of the campaign, the pre-rolls were beginning to take their toll. “It's intrusive, it's evasive. It reeks of lies,” a college student told reporters. “Every time I try to watch a video on YouTube that has any kind of ad space there is a political ad there.”
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This suggests that as the Internet gets increasingly clogged with mandatory political advertising in coming cycles, the ennui toward it may begin to look like the antipathy TV political advertising generates.

What acceptance, if not enthusiasm, for Internet political advertising does exist is based largely upon the fact that American voters are “mostly in the dark” about the extent and nature of how they are being spied upon as the basis for microtargeting. “Consumers don't really understand what's going on and haven't given their permission,” said the University of Pennsylvania's Joseph Turow, perhaps the leading expert on the subject.
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Ad industry representatives twist themselves into pretzels to demonstrate that surveys show people view their being microtargeted on the Internet by advertisers as a good thing.
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What those surveys fail to convey to the respondents is that the gathering of this information is surreptitious and being done without the consumer's approval or awareness, or that the targeting might be done by politicians. On both counts, the evidence is in and it is overwhelming: the American people do not like surreptitious microtargeting, and they especially do not like it if it is done by a politician. As one reporter put it after she learned about microtargeting and paid closer attention to what showed up on her screen, and then consulted others who were also made aware of the process, “If this sounds intrusive, it is. Voters get the sense they are being stalked around the Internet.”
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The most comprehensive research done on the popular understanding of and attitude toward Internet political advertising was conducted by Turow and a team of his colleagues at Penn and published in July 2012. While 61 percent of Americans do not want “ads for products or services that are tailored to your interests,” a whopping 86 percent do not want “political advertising tailored to your interests.” When Americans learn how exactly politicians get the data to do their microtargeting, support for digital political advertising all
but disappears. People do not even support the practice if it is being done to them (or others) by candidates they endorse. Sixty-four percent said their support for their candidate would decrease if they found out a candidate was microtargeting them differently from their neighbor. Seventy-seven percent of respondents would not return to a Web site if they knew “it was sharing information about me with political advertisers.” The survey found that “a large number of internet-using Americans—almost two out of five—are so wary of political advertisers' use of people's data that they simply do not want that use to take place under any conditions.”
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The system survives and prospers based upon the ignorance of the general population, which is largely clueless about the total lack of privacy online and, increasingly, everywhere. This system is also fueled, we might add, by the determination of political, consulting, and media players who prefer not to level with the voters they are in the process of manipulating for electoral and economic gain.

To the extent citizens are aware, however, the authors conclude, “What we have is a major attitudinal tug of war—a political class pulling for new ways to divide and address the populace versus a public that appears deeply uncomfortable, even angry, about activities pointing in that direction.”
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What is striking to our eyes is how acutely the public understands and anticipates genuine threats to the political system augured by the emerging system of digital political advertising. The idea of political privacy is a bedrock principle that few Americans are willing to abandon knowingly. “Anonymity has been crucial to our political process,” said Chris Calabrese of the American Civil Liberties Union. “It's the reason for the secret ballot, it's the reason the Federalist Papers were anonymous.”
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“A lot of people consider their political identity more private than lots of information,” remarked William McGeveran, a data privacy expert at the University of Minnesota Law School. “We make rules about medical privacy. We make rules about financial privacy. So if you think private political beliefs are in that category, maybe you're concerned about having them treated like your favorite brand of toothpaste.”
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Nor is this a purely theoretical or an abstract matter; there could be real consequences. “There is growing concern,” the
New York Times
wrote, “that the campaigns or third-party trackers may later use that voter data for purposes the public never imagined, like excluding someone from a job offer based on his or her past political affiliations.”
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This became a concern in Wisconsin,
following the bitter 2012 recall election, which tried to remove antilabor governor Scott Walker. Close to 1 million Wisconsinites signed petitions demanding that Walker face a new election after he attacked collective bargaining rights in the state. Walker backers demanded that officials post the names of petition signers online, which was done. Search tools were developed so that the lists could be reviewed not just by election officials but also by conservative activists with a so-called Verify the Vote movement. So, too, could potential employers, overzealous partisans, and even stalkers.
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The harassment following the release of the lists became so serious that the group leading the petition drive announced, “In the face of threats and intimidation from Walker supporters throughout the duration of the petition campaign, we strongly encourage anyone who perceives they are being attacked for exercising their democratic right in this process should immediately contact law enforcement. Furthermore, law enforcement should act swiftly to investigate any such allegations.”
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As it happened, employees of media companies, sitting judges, and others were “exposed” as petition signers and attacked by Walker backers.
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These incidents played out against the backdrop of a large, relatively transparent public campaign. Imagine what will happen, indeed, what is already happening, behind the closed doors of powerful political operations such as Karl Rove's American Crossroads combine or its Democratic equivalents.

The developing patterns of political advertising online should concern Americans. The logic of TV political advertising going back to Rosser Reeves's packaging of Dwight Eisenhower for the 1952 election on through to Lee Atwater's peddling of George Herbert Walker Bush and right up to the present has been to say whatever has to be said to get votes—even if it is irrelevant to the candidate or actual governance, even if it is untrue. This is all about manipulation. Just win, baby. Now provide that modus operandi with infinite data, supercomputer power, mind-boggling digital production technologies, unlimited funds, and microtargeting. There is the increased likelihood “that individuals will receive ads from candidates based on what the campaign's statisticians believe they want to hear,” Turow's Penn study noted. “It will be possible for campaigns to virtually envelop households and individuals with candidates created
for them
.”
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Politico
's Jon Peha put it like this: