What the Obama data geeks did next

There’s a fascinating feature piece in the New York Times about what those who worked on the Barack Obama Presidential campaign went on to do:

Political marketing has usually lagged behind commercial marketing. 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.

It’s notable that one of the main tasks for which big data was employed was the highly traditional one of working out how to optimise the campaign’s TV advertising spend.

Read the full piece here.