Introduction

As I was watching a movie online just before US presidential election last year, the website displayed an advertisement every ten minutes. Since I had not paid anyone for watching the movie and am used to watching commercials on television, it should not have been unusual to see a commercial every ten minutes or so. The website, however, showed me the same commercial over and over. After about the eighth time, I felt sorry for the poor advertiser (someone advertising for Mitt Romney as presidential candidate) because the effectiveness of the ad had long since dissipated and, instead, an annoyance factor had crept in. I was facing a real-time decision engine that was rigid and was placing an advertisement without any count or analysis of saturation factor. As an aside, I lived in a “swing state” for the fall 2012 US presidential elections, so it is possible the advertising agency for the candidate had decided to saturate the advertisements at my location. I must confess, I am not very politically aligned with either party. However, I do have a curiosity about marketing analytics and how political candidates market themselves. So, I decided to respond to the Obama campaign to compare the two. I was amazed to see a level of personalization in the campaign. Unlike the push campaign from Romney, the Obama campaign team worked hard to collect and document my personal political preferences, and knew how to target his responses personally to me in emails.