MicroTargeting the 2009 Elections
Congratulations to the Christie campaign, the McDonnell campaign, the Republican National Committee, the Republican Governors Association, the legislative and municipal victors and to all those who worked tirelessly on the ground to make Election Day 2009 successful for Republicans. TargetPoint was glad to be a part of some of those important victories and is looking forward to providing winning Republican campaigns with innovative tools for 2010.
TargetPoint Consulting pioneered the modern concept of political MicroTargeting and executed it on a national scale in the 2004 race for the Presidency. Success was seen as a new way of conducting political campaigns, and we knew it wouldn’t be long before the Democrats caught on to our secret. We also knew that only by challenging ourselves and honing what we had learned would we be able to keep pace, or better yet, stay ahead of the game. We committed ourselves to studying new techniques, new applications and always improving the tools that we used on behalf of our clients. After 2008, with the emergence of Catalist on the Democratic side and other firms claiming to offer "microtargeting" and “targeted” lists, it became clear that to continue our commitment to innovation, we needed to make serious investments in both time and resources.
In December of last year, TargetPoint made a substantial investment in state of the art hardware and software upgrades and embarked on a top to bottom review our methodologies and procedures. We began experimenting with new techniques and different data collection methods. Despite what appeared to be a bleak political market in December of last year, we knew that in order to stay the industry leader we needed to invest in the future.
Fortunately, the political marketplace was shocked into action by the ambitious Obama agenda and we were provided immediate opportunities to utilize our new assets. Over the course of the last year, we deployed several beta projects as we assisted clients engaged in debates ranging from labor issues and gun rights, to health care and cap and trade.
We were also honored to work with the Republican National Committee and the Christie campaign in New Jersey where we were able to deploy one of our latest innovations – the SmartTarget system - which adapts to a changing electorate.
By deploying the SmartTarget system in New Jersey we were able to quickly adapt to New Jersey’s rapidly changing political environment in ways never before possible. As Chris Daggett was building momentum and Corzine was outspending Christie with his millions, it was clear that the Christie campaign would need laser precision in its efforts to defeat both candidates. Coupled with an already implemented state of the art MicroTargeting contact program, we were able to quickly and inexpensively implement SmartTarget. We collected fresh survey data, married it with information from the grassroots effort on the ground, and utilized our new hardware and software capabilities to produce exactly what the campaign needed most – a list of those people most likely to “date Daggett, but marry Christie."
Six days after we initiated the project, we were able to provide the names of 292,176 prime targets for the campaign to make the case for Chris Christie - those individuals that had been attracted to Daggett, but could be convinced Christie was the better choice.
We look forward to utilizing SmartTarget and our other new products and applications for our 2010 clients. We also remain committed to maintaining our role as the the cutting edge innovators of MicroTargeting for political and public policy campaigns.
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