… In the wake of big Democratic victories in 2012, the outside groups that raised and spent so much on Republicans’ behalf have spent a considerable amount of time and effort analyzing their performance. Their goals are two-fold: Improve their strategies and tactics in order to win future races, and convince [...] Read more »
Obama’s Voter Mobilization Was Barely More Effective than Romney’s
Does the 2012 Obama campaign deserve the hype? Many journalists have praised the technological and strategic advantage of Obama over Romney’s campaign. The 2012 Obama campaign is often described as an extension and improvement of the 2008 effort, which has been credited as one of the first campaigns to make [...] Read more »
Center Will Act as Information Clearinghouse and Offer New Tools for Measuring Impact of Media
What is the difference? If your question is like that one, more practical than philosophical, the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism may soon have an answer. With $3.25 million in initial financing from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the John S. and James L. [...] Read more »
The G.O.P.’s Digital Makeover
The Republican Party faces hurdles as it attempts to equal or surpass the Democratic Party’s success in capitalizing on technological innovation to win President Obama a second term. It was only two presidential elections ago, in 2004, that the political classes were talking about Republican domination of data mining and [...] Read more »
You May Not Have Posted It, but Facebook Knows
… In late February, Facebook announced partnerships with four companies that collect lucrative behavioral data, from store loyalty card transactions and customer e-mail lists to divorce and Web browsing records. … Targeted advertising bears important implications for consumers. It could mean seeing advertisements based not just on what they “like” [...] Read more »
Giving Viewers What They Want
… In any business, the ability to see into the future is the killer app, and Netflix may be getting close with “House of Cards.” … Film and television producers have always used data, holding previews for focus groups and logging the results, but as a technology company that distributes [...] Read more »
A Database of Names and How They Connect
It sounds like a Rolodex for the 1 percent: two million deal makers, power brokers and business executives — not only their names, but in many cases the names of their spouses and children and associates, their political donations, their charity work and more — all at a banker’s fingertips. [...] Read more »
Overwhelming Hispanic Support for Obama Wasn’t Preordained in 2012
… Given the key role that Latinos had played in Obama’s 2008 win, this particular leg of his coalition looked pretty wobbly just a year and a half before Election Day. Little wonder that when pollsters, including Gallup, Peter Hart and Bill McInturff for NBC News and The Wall Street [...] Read more »
In Minnesota, Democratic Grandmas Gather Data About Their Neighbors
In Minnesota, Democratic volunteers scour their local newspapers each morning for letters to the editor with a political slant. They pay attention to the names of callers on radio shows. They drive through their neighborhoods and jot down the addresses of campaign lawn signs. Then they feed the information into [...] Read more »
Sure, Big Data Is Great. But So Is Intuition
… Big Data, said Professor [Erik] Brynjolfsson, will “replace ideas, paradigms, organizations and ways of thinking about the world.” These drumroll claims rest on the premise that data like Web-browsing trails, sensor signals, GPS tracking, and social network messages will open the door to measuring and monitoring people and machines [...] Read more »