What: Microtargetting article
When: July 5, 2007
Link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/04/AR2007070401423.html?hpid%3Dtopnews&sub=AR
Reading Notes:
Good summary about the art of microtargeting. Reminds me of Stephenson's "The Interface"
"Take corporate America's love affair with learning everything it can about its customers, and its obsession with carving up the country into smaller and smaller clusters of like-minded consumers, and turn those trends into a political strategy. The Bush majority would be made up of thousands of groups of like-minded voters whom the campaign could reach with precisely the right message on the issues they considered most important."
* sold karl rove on it after a successful trail in 2003
* predicted voter's tendencies with 90% accuracy
* credited with delivering ohio to bush
* now working for romney - "The governor believes in accountability, benchmarks and metrics,"
The more information he has, the better he can group people into "target clusters" with names such as "Flag and Family Republicans" or "Tax and Terrorism Moderates." Once a person is defined, finding the right message from the campaign becomes fairly simple.
* different messages even if you live next door to eachother
* skeptics say "it still comes down to shoe leather." - [funny, the lack of a shoe leather understanding is what brought down the characters in "The Interface".
"a campaign can identify segments within larger demographic groups and tailor messages down to the household level -- an extraordinary amount of precision that helps turn a guessing game into a series of targeted strikes"
"The first step in doing this is conducting a large survey of voters. By matching up their political views with detailed information about their consumer habits, a model is established that can be applied to the population as a whole.
A campaign would then know which issues are important to an unmarried woman who subscribes to Outside magazine and is a frequent flier, and how they are different from issues important to an unmarried woman who has two grown children, uses corrective lenses and is an AARP member -- even if they are next-door neighbors."
* they crafted their messages to talk about what voters thought was most important - not what they thought was most important.
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