http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/07/16/obama_data/Barack Obama's super marketing machine
He knows your neighborhood, your favorite products and even when you open your e-mail. How Obama is betting on vast, corporate-style voter outreach to win the White House.
By Mike Madden
July 16, 2008 | WASHINGTON -- About every week or so, you get an e-mail from Barack Obama campaign manager David Plouffe, or top deputy Steve Hildebrand, or maybe Obama himself. They're breezy and informal, addressing you by first name at the outset (before they ask you to donate money at the end). But that's just the beginning.
You know, of course, that Obama has your e-mail address. You may not have realized that he probably also has your phone number and knows where you're registered to vote -- including whether that's a house or an apartment building, and whether you rent or own. He's got a decent estimate of your household income and whether you opened a credit card recently. He knows how many kids you're likely to have and what you do for a living. He knows what magazines and catalogs you get and whether you're more apt to get your news from cable TV, the local newspaper or online. And he knows what time of day you tend to get around to plowing through your in box and responding to messages.
The 5 million people on Obama's e-mail list are just the start of what political strategists say is one of the most sophisticated voter databases ever built. Using a combination of the information that supporters are volunteering, data the campaign is digging up on its own and powerful market research tools first developed for corporations, Obama's staff has combined new online organizing with old-school methods of voter outreach to assemble a central database for hitting people with messages tailored as closely as possible to what they're likely to want to hear. It's an ambitious melding of corporate marketing and grassroots organizing that the Obama campaign sees as a key to winning this fall.
The sheer scale of the operation -- because of Obama's large network of supporters and heavy emphasis on field organizing -- means the data can be sliced in ways that the Bush-Cheney campaign couldn't have dreamed of in 2004. It's most likely also more advanced than what either side did in the 2006 elections, or, for that matter, what John McCain is doing now.
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That's part of what makes the Obama effort different from, say, Howard Dean's 2004 campaign, which raised (for back then) impressive amounts of money online and built a large e-mail list but never really integrated everything into one system. Now, Obama isn't letting any pieces of potentially useful information go uncollected. "It's not an innovative campaign, but it's an extraordinarily professional one," said Zephyr Teachout, who ran Dean's online organizing. "They've taken all our stupid ideas and made them smart."
But they've also taken all of Capital One's ideas and put them to work. It seems Joe McGinnis had it right 40 years ago, when "The Selling of the President" chronicled how techniques from Madison Avenue helped send Richard Nixon to Pennsylvania Avenue. If Obama wins the White House in part by looking at voters the way corporations look at consumers, by 2012 it may be even harder to tell where politics ends and marketing begins.
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