The Obama campaign was able to use targeted sharing on 85 percent of its turnout targets aged 29 and under, largely through Facebook, which was used to reach 5 million such prospects. "What businesses find so tantalizing about the Obama campaign is that it has advanced this phenomenon to its next iteration," Bloomberg Businessweek noted. "Your friend isn't just raving about Pepsi; he's telling you, in language and images likely to resonate with you, that you should be drinking Pepsi, too."
The significance of this observation cannot be underestimated, as if offers deep perspective on the extent to which the civic and democratic values that ought to underpin our politics are being replaced by commercial and entertainment values -- so much so that businesses now emulate campaigns. We have come full circle from the days when Adlai Stevenson said in 1956, "The idea that you can merchandise candidates for high office like breakfast cereal is the ultimate indignity to the democratic process." Now the folks who sell breakfast cereal are taking marketing cues from the folks who do politics.
The lesson of 2012 was summed up by reporter Molly McHugh: "No interested candidate is going to see this campaign and not want to replicate what the Obama team was able to do by taking the mountains of information the Internet holds and turn it into deliverables." "Everyone will want to jump on the data train," ElectNext CEO Keya Dannenbaum said after the election. "Much like Obama pioneered campaigning on social media and now all politicians are there, so too it will be with big data." Or as Kantar Media president Ken Goldstein put it, "Future campaigns ignore the targeting strategy of the Obama campaign of 2012 at their peril." This is the next stop on the path of the money-and-media election complex.
At this point, the ethical and social implications of the digital transformation of campaigns are still mostly unexplored. It is a world where the guiding principle is, as Ghani put it, "Will it get me more votes? If not, I don't care." For some insiders, the seamy underside of digital data collection and microtargeting may be better left unsaid. "These are the kinds of things that I think smart people would keep to themselves," an interactive political consultant said. The process may be getting to the point where it cannot be ignored. An ad executive with experience on Republican campaigns provided a sober assessment: "They are tactics that are pretty standard in marketing, but they are nonetheless "Orwellian.' Those of us who've read 1984 look at this and say, "This is unbelievable.'" Nor should Democrats regard the digital transformation as not especially problematic because their guy won. The great political reporter David Broder interviewed LBJ staffers after their landslide election victory in 1964. Broder noted the "lip-smacking glee" they exhibited at how the revolutionary Daisy TV ad "had foisted on the American public a picture of Barry Goldwater as the nuclear-mad bomber who was going to saw off the eastern seaboard of the United States." "The only thing that worries me, Dave," one of the staffers confided to Broder, "is that some year an outfit as good as ours might go to work for the wrong candidate."
The new book by John Nichols and Bob McChesney, Dollarocracy: How the Money and Media Election Complex is Destroying America, is published this week by Nation Books. Former FCC Commissioner Michael Copps says: "Dollarocracy gets at what's ailing America better than any other diagnosis I've encountered. Plus it prescribes a cure. What else could a reader -- or a citizen -- ask? To me, it's the book of the year."
After the Greek government announced the closing of the state broadcaster ERT, workers occupied the building while protesters gathered outside. Read Maria Margaronis's report here.
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