Digital Destiny

Rupert Murdoch’s MySpace has just announced “plans to hold their own Presidential primary. The social networking giant will hold virtual elections on January 1 and 2, 2008.” [via Webpronews]. Here’s what Fox Interactive execs said: “The MySpace community will give America its first Presidential primary winner in 2008,” said Chris DeWolfe, CEO of MySpace. Tom Anderson, MySpace president was quoted saying “Iowa and New Hampshire may be selecting delegates, but the MySpace vote will be the first test of where candidates stand in the election year.”

Will this be a truly secret ballot? Or will MySpace’s extensive data collection system merely add our presidential preferences to what it calls its “digital gold“—our data files? Supporters of online campaigning must do a better job raising the ethical and policy issues. Otherwise they will end up with an interactive election system which does not truly reflect the Internet’s democratic potential.

The role which precision marketing plays in political campaigns, especially the use of largely stealth data collection and targeting technologies, requires serious debate and action. Voters—and the general public—have no clue that data about them is being collected, analyzed and profiled. Nor do they comprehend the disturbing range of segmentation techniques being designed as massive weapons of personalized persuasion.

Here is an example of what’s already being done to target voters—largely out of public view and consent. Political leaders—including the presidential candidates—have to come “clean” about the use of such techniques. We don’t believe any interactive marketing technologies should be applied without full disclosure and consent of the individual. Digital political marketing also requires policy safeguards.

Here’s an excerpt from a report that discusses the role of micro targeting in the recent election campaign of Michael Bloomberg, Mayor of New York City. My bold.

“… we evaluated over 200 variables and segmented one of the most diverse cities in the world into seven separate and statistically distinct categories that were defined by primarily but not exclusively by psychographics – the motives behind voting behavior. Based on each of these segments we developed a range of potential messages and alternative executions. To develop the micro-targeting framework, we created a proprietary algorithm to predict how every individual voter in NYC would respond to different combinations of the potential messages and executions. The input to this model included:

· Demographics
· Psychographics
· Geography
· Voter history
· Lifestyle data
· Consumer data
· Responses to survey questions and alternative messages
Based on the predictions of the model we then identified the optimal
communications for each of the 4.2 million voters on file…”
source: “Silent Marketing: Micro-targeting.” Tom Agan. Penn, Schoen, & Berland Associates. 2007

This is another in our series of warnings that unless campaign finance reform advocates act soon, the system requiring big money for campaigns will fully extend into all the digital platforms. Here’s an excerpt from a good story by Jim Puzzanghera of the LA Times [reg. required] that discusses Google’s new political ad sales team: “Google appears to be the most aggressive in reaching out to campaigns, suggesting that the Web giant thinks online politics may be approaching the point at which the company can make money from it….Campaigns spent about $12 million on online advertising in the 2004 presidential campaign, a tiny amount compared with the $1.6 billion they allocated to TV ads, said Michael A. Bassik, vice president of Internet strategy for MSCH Partners, an online political marketing firm. But campaign spending overall is shooting up. The amount spent on all political races in 2004 — about $4 billion — is expected to more than double in 2008. And just as many major companies are doing, political campaigns are expected to shift more of their ad dollars to the Web. Google wants to be ready when that happens.”

As for privacy, and the need to protect voters from the negative consequences of data collection, behavioral targeting, etc., see this quote from the LA Times’ story: “The Google network allows you to do very interesting things with targeting, with messaging, etc., in a way that you could never pull off with a 30-second TV spot,” Derek Kuhl, who is leading a New York-based political sales team [for Google] that will have three or four people, told the group.”

Here’s a link to the video of Google’s Eliot Schrage recently discussing the company and online politics, etc.