The end of segmentation as we know it...

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I came across an interesting article this evening about the Obama campaign's use of big data and social media during the 2012 election.  It relates to the big data lessons learned last week, and whether or not one is an Obama supporter, there are valuable lessons to be learned from his campaign's innovative use of social media and big data during the months proceeding the election.

Mike Ellsworth writes:

Time magazine[3] states that social media was extremely important to the get-out-the-vote efforts of the Obama campaign:

Online, the get-out-the-vote effort continued with a first-ever attempt at using Facebook on a mass scale to replicate the door-knocking efforts of field organizers. In the final weeks of the campaign, people who had downloaded an app were sent messages with pictures of their friends in swing states. They were told to click a button to automatically urge those targeted voters to take certain actions, such as registering to vote, voting early or getting to the polls. The campaign found that roughly 1 in 5 people contacted by a Facebook pal acted on the request, in large part because the message came from someone they knew.

The numbers also led the campaign to escort their man down roads not usually taken in the late stages of a presidential campaign. In August, Obama decided to answer questions on the social news website Reddit, which many of the President’s senior aides did not know about. “Why did we put Barack Obama on Reddit?” an official asked rhetorically. “Because a whole bunch of our turnout targets were on Reddit.”

According to Ad Age,[4] for the period between Sept. 1 and Oct. 14, the Obama camp had 497 creatives deployed across the Web compared with the Romney camp’s 90.

So advanced segmentation works, both on and off line. What does that mean for the future of brand marketing? That’s an answer for the next post.