As the Obama campaign swept up the confetti from its victory party last November, observers cited the campaign’s superior technology as the key difference in the race. It was a highly sophisticated effort that involved identifying new voters and coaxing them to the polls – a relentless, data-driven process that mixed old-fashioned organizing with 21st-century algorithms. Now these same methods are moving into the mainstream of corporate marketing.
Presidential elections have a way of amplifying the latest marketing innovation, sending once obscure techniques into the mainstream of consumer marketing. I’ve written before about how the use of social media by the Obama campaign in 2008 opened the way for brands to use these tools. Obama’s victory in 2012 further legitimized micro-targeting and other techniques that are now finding their way into mainstream brand marketing.
So it comes as no surprise that the guys behind the Obama campaign’s 2012 technology strategy have set up their own marketing shop, dubbed Analytics Media Group (AMG). Here’s a description of the trend AMG is leading from a New York Times article:
Companies that spend billions of dollars a year developing ways to make many more billions of dollars a year tend to have little to learn from presidential campaigns, which are generally start-ups aimed at a one-day sale. But the (re)selling of the president, 2012, was an entirely different matter. The campaign recruited the best young minds in the booming fields of analytics and behavioral science and placed them in a room they called “the cave” for up to 16 hours a day over the course of roughly 16 months. After the election, when the technology wizards finally came out, they had not only helped produce a victory that defied a couple of historical predictors; they also developed a host of highly effective marketing techniques that were either entirely new or had never been tried on such a grand scale.
This will be an interesting company to watch. And, unlike the Republican party, the competition in the corporate marketing world is tech-savvy and fiercely protective of its turf.