photograph by Michael Edwards
Brian Stults
Senior Vice President of Operations
YouGov/Polimetrix
Washington, D.C.
The Data Hunter
Brian Stults, 29, helped mastermind one of the largest get-out-the-vote drives in U.S. history for America Coming Together. In 2005, he joined the nonpartisan polling firm Polimetrix, which was bought last year by London-based YouGov.
"Four years ago, including household data in a model wasn't commonplace. Now you might include variables such as the party composition of people in a household -- not just how many Democrats and Republicans live there, but what the structure is. Is the woman the Democrat and the man the Republican? If you know that Volvo owners are predisposed to one candidate or another, you can try to identify people who have purchased that particular car. What's typically done is to go to a large clearinghouse to get your data, and the variable there might be 'luxury car.' But some of the subtler distinctions are much more relevant and significant, so we interview 5,000 people every single day and ask them about specific brands. We're aware that buying a package of 200 generic consumer variables doesn't work, so we're looking for those dead ringers that make models more predictive."
Sara Taylor
Cofounder
Resonate Networks
Alexandria, Virginia
The Web Sleuth
Sara Taylor, 34, a former Bush White House senior strategist, is developing online-microtargeting tools and strategies for corporate clients.
"Building a successful presidential campaign is like building a Fortune 500 company in a matter of months, so even though businesses have been doing microtargeting for a long time, they can learn a lot from how political professionals use data. In 2004, we used a microtargeting model that proved incredibly important to the president's reelection, and we looked at variables that businesses don't. The average company might think it is crazy to ask what a person's religion or ideology is, for instance, but the reality is that that says something about a consumer.
Real microtargeting has not yet been done on the Internet, but my new company, Resonate Networks, is really close. We study people's Web-site behavior and marry it with survey data in ways that show their attitudes, values, and how active they are in their communities. Let's say Huggies has a product that decomposes much more quickly than other diapers. There's a section of the population that would like to know that."
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Recent Comments | 16 Total
September 19, 2008 at 10:14pm by Beth Smits
i realize i'm naive, but i totally resent political microtargeting. i feel like i personally defy micro-targets (but as i said, i'm naive). Here are some facts about me: I drive an SUV (it's an imported hybrid that gets 26 MPG), i fall into the highest income categoy (although i think it's fair to pay more in taxes if they are used to better society), my husband and i are members of a country club and don't have children (not for lack of trying), i recycle regularly and am careful about my energy consumption, i get irritated when my ability to leverage saving programs are limited (ie, 401K and company match), i am a pro-choice Christian who believes that any conversations about gay marriage distact us from topics like the status of the global economy and the changing face of Russia. So who am I, and what message will you target to me?
September 30, 2008 at 1:18am by Ujwal Watgule
As Beth said, I beleive there are numerous people with variaty of interests and lifestyle. And to microtarget such people in the expectation of generalised data useful to form or draw opinions would be (I think)a riskier move.But in the context of Microtargeting, opinions are always driven by people and then the inferences drawn can certainly be a valuable sources of information in measuring the people's potential moves in the consumer markets.
May 1, 2009 at 6:04pm by Jeff French
@Beth - The point of microtargeting is actually to make sure that people like you (those who fall outside stereotypical categories) don't fall to the fringes of (politically or otherwise) targeted campaigns. By selecting and appealing to individual values and politics rather than a more generalized pool, these groups have better success with making their messages identifiable. Instead of blanketing ten thousand people with the same message, they can send ten unique messages to a thousand people.
That said, there's still plenty of reason to resent microtargeting. Even more than before, you're being targeted as a statistic rather than a person, so your value is summed up and utilized by your polled data. Perhaps not a huge leap from how things were before, but one could definitely argue that it's a continued shift away from relating to people on a more personal level. On the other hand, this is something that can also potentially help people rally together with those they can identify with on issues of importance. It's easy for me to be cynical about this stuff, but I still have quite mixed feelings about the whole approach.