Your valuable name - you’re on the list!

Posted on October 28, 2007

Ever wonder how that furniture company decided to send you an ad for kids furniture or the car dealer sent you one offering discounts on a new car? The real estate company offers a market evaluation?

And did you notice, it sometimes seems like they are reading your mind, that they know what you want to buy and when. Mind readers - well no - data miners more likely.

Do you have a valued customer with the grocery store? Did you send in the rebate info for the new electronic gadget you bought? Did you call the 800 number to claim a prize offered on your cash register receipt?

All these and lots more add data for the miners. When you buy chips and beer the week before your favorite team plays on Monday night football, when you buy crayons and book bags in late August, when you buy the new oil for high mileage cars, to data miners get info about you.

All this info get gathered into huge lists and they combine it with much more from other lists. The lists of people who moved from the post office, the voter registration lists, the census neighborhood demographics lists, the TV ratings data, if you can imagine a list that in any way connects a person to a group of people doing something, that is a list that is mined.

All those rebates at Staples and many other stores - why offer $20 by mail rather than just drop the price? Most people assume the companies are just playing the odds - people buy based on the after rebate price but most will forget to send in the rebate on time. Not so much.

They are buying your name and address and connecting it to an activity.

When the grocery offers you 2 liter bottles of Coke for 10 for $10 if you use your valued customer card - it is not cause they have too much Coke and want to move it - they want you to use the card. When you use the card for the discount, they also get to connect you to all the other stuff in the basket. This does help them tailor their inventories but they also sell the info to the data miners.

Why am I talking about all this on my political blog?

All this data is now available to the political campaigns. They can tell target a mailing list to people who live in a district who bought school supplies and packaged snacks in late August (have kids), beer in 24 can cases on Friday or Saturday - more so on weekends when Nascar is racing, (there Nascar fan there), prepackaged frozen food but not much prepare at home type foods like fresh chicken and raw potatoes (two working parents), do significant amounts of buying around noon on Sundays (on their way home from church). These people will probably be good to get a campaign mailer highlighting family values.

Columbia U has this report:

There has been a pile of discussion over the past few years regarding the use of data mining technology in politics. The public perceives data mining as an intrusion of their privacy. As with any kind of technology, it is hard to restrict it: it just goes underground. At the same time, new technology used improperly is just like a new gun to a soldier - in the short run he’s better off with a better gun, but in the long run everyone’s worse off because the enemies will have better guns too.

The data miners know what kind of car you drive (from the oil change you got), how old your kids are (shoe sizes), what magazines you buy or subscribe to, which online newspapers you read. They know so much about you that there is no reason to send out a campaign mailer to occupant or a pro life ad to a pro abort home. It not only wastes money but it might even encourage voters to vote for the opponent. Sending the right message to the right voter is the way to win.

The Democrats started getting interested it this after losing in 2004 this was in a WAPO article last year:

In 2002, for the first time in recent memory, Republicans ran better get-out-the-vote programs than Democrats. When well done, such drives typically raise a candidate’s Election Day performance by two to four percentage points. Democrats have become increasingly fearful that the GOP is capitalizing on high-speed computers and the growing volume of data available from government files and consumer marketing firms — as well as the party’s own surveys — to better target potential supporters.

» Filed Under Legislators, National Politics