Micro-Targeting: Resisting and Buying the Obama Brand

           

            In my job as an evaluator at the World Bank, I do quite a bit of tailored data-mining through social database research and stratified interviews. Thus, in principle, I should not have anything against micro-targeting because I am in some sense a practitioner of it. But it does bother me, especially when the data being mined is about me.

 

            “They Have Your Number” writes Garrett Graff in his October 2008 article in The Washingtonian about micro-targeting in political campaigning. “The Catalist database (a political data-mining firm) …contains some 280 million individual records.” In this YouTube video, chief technology officer Vijay Ravindran explains Catalist’s data architecture:

 

 

 

 

The totalitarian specter of Big Brother/Huge Business invading each individual citizen’s privacy is worrisome enough. But it gets downright scary when they use the database to take action with a view to producing a specific result, such as in the 2002 Texas Senate and Colorado Congressional races, when GOP micro-targeters “…even studied the roads Republicans drove as they commuted to work, which allowed the party to put billboards where they would do the most good.”

 

Not only does this smack of commercial opportunism.  There is also something immoral and unethical about manipulating people’s behavior to elicit a self-serving outcome, by obtaining information that people have held in the private sphere precisely because those are areas where they feel vulnerable.

 

And despite the euphemisms, the bottom line is behavioral manipulation. Jeff Navin, managing director of the research and strategy firm American Environics, says that if one can define the “psychological drivers that will help understand the values behind the behavior, you can speak to those values and persuade voters.”  Micro-targeting shares much of the same goals and strategies as marketing and product branding. Navin’s firm, for example, found out in an ongoing survey that Hillary Clinton scored high among voters who also looked favorably on McDonalds, Wal-Mart and Starbucks – all national chains. They therefore concluded that the name Clinton was the most popular national Democratic brand.

 

            But is this invasion really new?  From that first time we ever ventured into the World Wide Web, without which we can no longer survive, we have turned ourselves into prey. Where we go can be researched and our steps can be traced. Besides, most surveys show that people actually like to be discovered and talk about themselves. We may feign intrusion, but we do want to be found. Even if it’s just for 15 minutes.

 

So what do I think about micro-targeting?

           

            I accept, because it’s already here and I do reap some benefits from it. But I resist, because the micro-targeters simply invited themselves in (“Here Comes Everybody!”), it was not my free choice, and I know I am being manipulated.

 

            I resent the fact that, for what should be a noble personal act as electing a President, political campaigning now shares the same ethos as market research and product targeting, branding, packaging, and delivery. But then I just bought the Obama brand.