Data Was the Biggest Winner in the 2012 Election

The 2012 election demonstrated, beyond a doubt, the power of using data and analytics in political campaigning. A new generation of data crunchers, predictive modelers and online marketers emerged triumphant, outflanking supposed political masterminds like Karl Rove to more accurately take the pulse of the electorate, get out the vote and raise money, opines Rio Longacre in a recent "Target Marketing" magazine column. Longacre remarks that "there's no doubt in anyone's mind that for data-driven marketers, the 2012 U.S. election victory was a watershed moment in history." If the "secret sauce" behind Obama's win was his massive data effort, the master chefs were a new cadre of data techs. Obama relied on an in-house team of data scientists and online marketers, recruiting elite and senior tech talent from Twitter, Google, Facebook, Craigslist and Quora, as Longacre points out. Because of their success, expect to see "data" driving political campaigning in more new and exciting directions. For the full article, see http://www.targetmarketingmag.com/blog/winner-2012-presidential-election-data#