Deus ex machina

THE scene could be in Tampa, or Santa Barbara, or Chicago. Mr and Mrs Sixpack are relaxing after dinner with their iPads. Each is looking at the same news website, but each will be shown different political advertising. He sees something about naval bases, from the Romney camp; she sees a post about the president’s environmental record. This is a new trick. Behind this year’s digital campaigns—whether through e-mail, social networks, apps or web advertising—lies an enormous body of data that have been integrated for the first time.

Sasha Issenberg, author of a new book, “The Victory Lab”, says the innovation in this election cycle is that the campaigns are able to link online and offline data. Voter-registration files have been merged with vast quantities of bought consumer data, on top of which come bought or acquired e-mails, mobile and landline numbers, as well as data gathered through canvassing, phone banks and social-media pages. The campaigns are also making use of cookies, the crumbs of data people leave behind when they browse the net. It is these that allow Mr and Mrs Sixpack to be sent different advertising.

The point of all these data is to mine them for insights into the electorate and identify pockets of voters who can be won over—either to vote, spend or volunteer. (The darker side of the art is to scare off voters leaning towards the other candidate.) In the past, advertising would be bought directly through websites that might produce the right sort of supporters. Now specific audiences are bought through central advertising exchanges, such as those run by Google or AOL, and the advertising will run anywhere the audience happens to be.

This is more effective. As a result, digital campaign spending is continuing to nibble away at television budgets and seems likely to do so in future. Borrell Associates, an online-advertising consultancy, says online spending for the 2012 elections will reach $160m nationwide, six times higher than in 2008. Others suggest the figure will be closer to $300m.

Mobile phones offer a big new opportunity this time, as over half of voters now have smartphones. About 10% of donations have been sent via text or mobile app. This time round the election is a properly social affair, with both sides engaged in a full range of platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr and Instagram. Each side is targeting its digital spending towards the audiences it is trying to reach, so it would be easy to read too much into reports that one side is doing better than another in certain parts of the digital campaign.

Social networks can reach voters who do not watch live television and have mobile phones rather than landlines. It can also establish links with people who tend not to vote by targeting their more politically motivated friends and families. It all seems to be working. When AYTM Market Research looked at American internet-users in September, more than a quarter said social media had influenced their political opinions.

E-mail is still crucial, particularly for fund-raising. Patrick Ruffini, a Republican political strategist, suspects that Mr Obama is doing better at monetising his e-mail list, as he is sending twice as many e-mails as he did four years ago. These are also more hectoring and manipulative than they were 2008, presumably because that works. But the Republicans have done well at fund-raising on mobile phones.

Mr Obama probably has the edge in this war, not least because he has had five years to build his effort up. He also has two pieces of software for organising and mobilising supporters (a smartphone app and an online networking website), which could be crucial in getting out the vote and which will be giving a lot of real-time feedback from canvassing.

Both campaigns are constantly increasing their databases, testing out the conclusions they draw from them and re-targeting voters. (It is surely no accident that the man in charge of Mr Obama’s boffins is an expert in machine learning.) And both sides are probably running the largest political analysis operations in history. They know more about the electorate than the ranked masses of political journalists and pollsters. Voters may dislike being targeted so finely because of their political views. The truth is that this is inevitable, because the statistics show that it works.