All Politics Is Microtargeting

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photograph by Chris Crisman

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photograph by David Deal

Ken Strasma
President
Strategic Telemetry
Washington, D.C.

The Messenger's Helper

Ken Strasma, 42, focused on microtargeting as research director of the National Committee for an Effective Congress, a progressive lobbying group. He now heads targeting efforts for Barack Obama's campaign.

"Microtargeting has evolved from an interesting buzzword to a must-have technology for any serious campaign. Campaigns are all about getting messages out to the people who are most likely to be on the fence. We ask 10,000 voters their opinions on the race and key issues and combine the results with marketing data about them. We can predict how other people with similar demographic profiles would have answered those same questions, and we start to see trends. Gin drinkers may be more likely to be Democrats. Driving an SUV may make someone more likely to be Republican or more sensitive to changes in gas prices. Those correlations tell us what kinds of messages voters may be receptive to. In 2000, we found that one of the worst groups in Florida for Gore was young white men, but also that they could be moved by a message about protecting the Everglades."

Blaise Hazelwood
President
Grassroots Targeting
Alexandria, Virginia

The Self-Help Guru

Blaise Hazelwood, 37, spearheaded the construction of Voter Vault, the Republican National Committee's gargantuan database, and now creates microtargeting software.

"With Bush, our targeting efforts focused on turning out the base. Now with McCain, it's about convincing the swing voters. It's a different audience we're going after, and we're able to find those swing universes much better than we would have in the past.

But sometimes microtargeting isn't user-friendly enough -- a lot of campaigns get a book that explains it, and then that book goes on the shelf. I've built software that allows campaigns to understand their microtargeting data more easily. They can pull their own email and phone universes. The software will tell you, 'These are the swing groups, these are the people who are most likely to turn out.' All the end users have to do is pick what groups they want to target. If you have the budget to mail to only 40,000 people, you can decide which group you want and enter into the calculator exactly what you want your numbers to be."

Michael Meyers
President
Target Point Consulting
Alexandria, Virginia

The Mousetrap Maker

In addition to consulting for dozens of GOP candidates, Michael Meyers, 35, has helped shape marketing campaigns at Pfizer, SBC, and Wal-Mart.

"We're always looking for a better mousetrap. We've come up with about 30 major DNA strands within the electorate, such as soccer moms, Nascar dads, evangelical earth stewards, country-club Republicans, married-to-their-mortgage families. Then we say, 'These people need war-on-terror messages, these people need education messages, these people need tax messages.'

Like political America, corporate America realizes that trying to get people's attention in this fragmented world is a very tough thing. We're just starting to get our heels into the commercial world; businesses represent 15% to 20% of our clients. Businesses do a great job of marketing to their own customers. General Motors knows a lot about how to get people to buy another GM car, but we can show them strategies to attract a Ford buyer or a Toyota buyer."

Vijay Ravindran and Laura Quinn
CEO and CTO
Catalist
Washington, D.C.

The Information Architects

Before joining Catalist -- a progressive, private data-collecting organization cofounded by Laura Quinn, 48, a former Gore aide -- Vijay Ravindran, 34, worked at Amazon.

Ravindran: "At Amazon, I led the group that delivered the Amazon Prime feature. We found that if the wrong people subscribed to it, it was a huge loss leader, but if you found the right set, it could be great for business. We used microtargeting to find the people who wouldn't break the bank. In the political space, I felt it was very important to build a computing architecture that would take in real-time data, get them into a standardized format, and then load them into a place where they could be snapshotted out for particular purposes. That didn't exist before. Now we have an architecture that scales more than 15 terabytes of data while providing an interface for users to work with. We expect to leave this election cycle with a piece of permanent infrastructure that enables groups to do microtargeting more efficiently than ever before. It all boils down to one principle: Leave no data behind."