Cb2021 Classwork2 Us Presidency Re-Election 2012 Big Data Analytics

I think Obama’s election team had used Big Data Analytics to help to win the US Presidency Re-election in 2012.

For the election team, there were 50 staff who worked in an analytics department, 20 analysts were spread throughout different headquarters of the campaign, and another 30 concentrated on interpreting the data.

First, Obama’s election team built Media Optimizer to enable much more targeted advertisement purchases. Without Media Optimizer, TV advertisements buys were based on broad demographics, which was expensive and inefficient. With Media Optimizer, the election team could use statistical analysis to identify the target voters in the database. Next, the election team would collect demographics data, TV ratings and advertisement pricing data. Finally, the results would be reanalyzed for further changes. It was easier for the election team to determine the most efficient advertisements buys with the target voters for Obama, the shows which the voters watched and the pricing data of the advertisements. So, Obama campaign purchased twice the number of cable TV advertisements as the Romney campaign which were placed during niche programs and targeted at the precise demographic slices that the election team tried to reach. The election team placed the advertisements in unconventional media instead of just placing in local news programming. Obama could reach out to more voters who could be persuaded to vote for the Democrat. In addition, the team chose to hold a Q&A session on Reddit, which is a social news website as the data analytics showed that a large portion of their targets was on Reddit.

Secondly, the election team launch an intricate and metric-driven email campaign. This campaign drove a large proportion of online donations for his presidential bid. In this process, different people in the election team sent out the email to supporters with different messages. After that, the election team discovered that emails from Michelle, who is Obama’s wife had the best effect. Furthermore, the election team use HP Vertica to carry out proof-of-concept tests and seek a SQL-based environment, which is convenient for analysts’ needs and did not require knowledge of Java or statistical analytics. The election team built a powerful feedback loop that became more and more powerful when it was used and tweaked more. With AirWolf, when a voter was contacted by the field team in a door-to-door campaign, that voter's particular interests were recorded and fed back to the system of the election team. Then, the election team could answer nearly all questions quickly. This greatly enhanced the ability to pinpoint messaging and make it more feasible to sway voters.