THE BACK PAGE: Analytics, for the win
by Charles Anderer
December 11, 2012
For all but the
most politically addicted, the best thing that can be said about the 2012
presidential election is that it’s over. One of the most interesting things
that can be said about it, from a business perspective at least, is the
candidate that had the time and the know-how to build the better technology
strategy won.
Freed from the
primary process which had Mitt Romney playing operational catch-up right up to
Election Day, and drawing from the lessons of the 2008 campaign, which was
drowning in disparate databases, the Obama campaign invested $100 million in
technology supported by a team of highly qualified people. When the political
pros caught wind of it, they were skeptical. Take conservative pundit Peggy
Noonan:
“The other day a Republican political veteran forwarded
me a hiring notice from the Obama 2012 campaign. It read like politics as done
by Martians. The ‘Analytics Department’ is looking for ‘predictive
Modeling/Data Mining’ specialists to join the campaign’s ‘multi-disciplinary
team of statisticians,’ which will use ‘predictive modeling’ to anticipate the behavior
of the electorate. ‘We will analyze
millions of interactions a day, learning from terabytes of historical
data, running thousands of experiments, to inform campaign strategy and
critical decisions.’
This wasn’t the
passionate, take-no-prisoners Clinton War Room of ‘92, it was high-tech and
bloodless. Is that what politics is now?”
As it turns out, it’s a lot of what politics is now. And
pundits are becoming an endangered species.
Mind you, just as in business, a good IT strategy will
be undermined in a heartbeat by a flawed product. When your candidate snoozes
through a debate in front of 70 million people and gets carved up by his
opponent in the process, all the analytics in the world won’t prevent your
prospects for success from taking a hit. But, all other things being reasonably
equal, your chances for success increase when you have an edge in information.
Going through some of the things that the Obama campaign
did, you can see the relevance for gaming operators, or any large-scale
enterprise that endeavors to translate massive amounts of consumer information
into actionable business strategies. For instance, the 2008 campaign had too
many databases. Volunteers and the campaign office used different lists. Get-out-the-vote
lists were never reconciled with fundraising lists, and none of these lists
talked to each other. Some 13 million people had registered for online updates,
but there was no demographic data attached to them, making targeted messaging
impossible. The campaign sought to resolve these issues by spending 18 months
prior to the presidential run on “Project Narwhal,” an effort to create a
single megafile that it could merge with data and intelligence collected from
internal and external sources.
“The new megafile didn’t just tell the campaign how to
find voters and get their attention; it also allowed the number crunchers to
run tests predicting which types of people would be persuaded by certain kinds
of appeals,” reported Time
magazine’s Swampland blog.
“Call lists in field offices, for instance, didn’t just list names and numbers;
they also ranked names in order of their persuadability, with the campaign’s
most important priorities first.” Each night, the campaign’s analytics team
would run 66,000 simulations of the vote in swing states, and the information
coming out of those simulations would determine how and where it would spend
money.
Digging a little
deeper into the technology, Amazon’s cloud computing services were used to
support Narwhal, which the IT journal Ars Technica described as
“a set of services that acted as an interface to a single shared data store for
all of the campaign’s applications, making it possible to quickly develop new
applications and to integrate existing ones into the campaign’s system.” Those
apps include sophisticated analytics programs that targeted voters based on
sentiments within text and a “virtual field office” application that helped
volunteers communicate and collaborate.
“Being able to decouple all the apps from each other [by
using Narwhal] has such power,” Harper Reed, the chief technology officer for
the Obama campaign, told Ars.
“It allowed us to scale each app individually and to share a lot of data between
the apps, and it really saved us a lot of time.”
By Nov. 6, both sides
were confident of victory, and each could point to public polling that
supported their view. As it turned out, the Obama campaign was operating on
better information and had a much clearer idea who was buying its product.
Obama Campaign Manager Jim Messina told BuzzFeed Politics that its
computer models ultimately predicted Florida results within 0.2%, and Ohio
within 0.4%.
Looking back, Messina said something else that applies
to more than just politics.
“We demanded data on everything, we measured everything,” he said. “And
we put an analytics team inside of us to study us the entire time to make sure
we were being smart about things.”
Charles Anderer
is executive editor of BNP Media Gaming Group and also oversees content development, sales and marketing for the company’s trade shows and conferences, which include Bingo World, Southern Gaming Summit, Gaming Technology Summit, New York Gaming Summit and Casino Marketing. He can be contacted at andererc@bnpmedia.com.
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