How big brother got bigger.

• Author: Fischer, Raymond L.
• Position: Mass Media

THE 2012 presidential campaign rightfully garnered a variety of descriptions: "most expensive in history," "scientific revolution," "digital display battle," "future of politics," "first full digital election," "New Frontier," "New Age," and "Twitter Election." The descriptions all ring true. To reach constituents, the reelection campaign of Pres. Barack Obama utilized advanced digital technology such as informational websites (Google and Yahoo) and social networking websites (Facebook and Twitter).

Historically, the first presidential campaign use of the Internet occurred in 1992, when the Clinton/Gore ticket utilized e-mail, bulletin boards, and discussion groups. In 2008, Obama's Chicago-based headquarters used computer technology to raise significant donations, enlist several thousand campaign workers, and, ultimately, convince a majority of voters Obama should be president.

Although the 2008 effort achieved success with groundbreaking integrations of social media and Internet fundraising, former campaign manager David Olouffe admitted that "it was far from perfect." Vast information about donors, volunteers, and e-mail subscribers flowed into campaign headquarters only to terminate in multiple unintegrated databases not easily cross-referenced. Jim Messina, 2012 campaign manager, promised a totally different, metric-driven campaign--"statistic-based, algorithmic, and deductive."

Located in a Chicago skyscraper, the election headquarters occupied an entire floor the "size of a football field." The self-contained "nerve center" (comforts of food, soft drinks, coffee, and restrooms) accommodated more than 300 technology analysts and a life-sized cardboard cutout of Obama. Rows of software and data specialists, shoulder to shoulder, worked on specific assignments to maximize the use of technology. Tom Dickinson of Rolling Stone termed the staff in the "big room" the campaign's "real heroes."

A studious quiet prevailed in headquarters as digital staffers communicated among themselves and with workers on the ground, not by phone, but by e-mail, chat, and Twitter. During the campaign, the Obama team created more than 650 digital ads costing about $500,000,000--or 10% of Obama's expenditures for political advertising. Not just a victory for the President, the election will become the prototype for future campaigns utilizing demographic-based analysis.

The capability of Obama's technical team to respond to events "at the speed of light"...