04.09.2013 07:33 AM

Psychographics, geo-demographic segmentation and Howard Dean

All the fun stuff that helped Harper win.  Right here, in yesterday’s Hill Times.

4 Comments

  1. I read it on Sunday, and it is a great article. Joe Trippi (Dean for America campaign manager) was ceratinly on to something. Most readers of ‘The Revolution will Not be Televised’ did not understand the essence. Two way comunications engages people, and motivates them in a way seldom seen in politics before. The two subsequent Obama Campaigns recruited the same people who worked with Dean, and they leveraged it by applying big data. The combination of close engagement on a personal level, and mass customised communications inherent in big data use have changed electoral politics forever. The big data stuff is actually not complicated at all. It is just the automatic collection and segmentation of contact data into ever shrinking demographic slices. It is the engagement part that is trickier.

  2. Neil says:

    It is a little trickier in Canada. Our privacy laws are much stronger in Canada and much of the info used in microtargeting is not available in the same way as it is in the US. I went to a Campaigns and Elections session in Washington and talked to some microtargeting specialists, They said they do not and could not operate in Canada due to our stronger privacy laws, you can’t just buy the info. This is why the Tory lead in CIMS is so powerful, they have spent years collecting this info themselves and have made some mistakes doing it (sending jewish holiday greetings to non jews) but after 15 years of collecting all the info they can they have the actual ability to do micro targeting. If the NDP starts now, in 10 years they may have something.
    Of course us Libs are even further behind….sigh.

    • Neil, you were mis-informed. Canada’s privacy laws do NOT apply to political data users. If you read the relevant portion of the Act, you will see that the glaring exemption from privacy laws is ‘information used for political purposes’, a loophole big enough to drive a jumbo jet through. Furthermore, I have spoken with some Canadian vendors of Data that are fully aware that the act exempts political databases. I have direct knowledge of data vendors proposals to sell the data, and perform the analysis of VERY extensive data for the express purpose of micro-targeting, and profiling for political fundraising, and poll by poll electoral targeting for the GPC dating back to 2005. At the time I was running a small phone bank fundraising for the GPC, so I was included in the loop The Greens never actually followed through, for reasons I will not go into, but rest assured that at least one Party in Canada is firing on all cylinders in the data department

  3. Kelly says:

    What surprises me is it’s taken so long for political parties to do this. What the cons do is classic direct marketing. It’s been around for at least 50 years. The copywriting techniques go back to the 1920s.

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