The first past the post electoral system means that, for any party, the most important voter is the floating voter; a recent ComRes poll has shown that up to 40% of Britons are still undecided. With around 10m votes still up for grabs just days before the election, any major political party could theoretically secure a landslide win. Emerging digital targeting methods are making it easier for parties to do just that.

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Political campaigning still uses an outdated model

This election, the British political parties have started to move away from traditional electoral broadcast methods following the successes Obama enjoyed in 2008 and 2012 through heavy investment in digital. The two main parties have subsequently hired communications experts integral to the Obama campaigns – Jim Messina for the Conservatives and David Axelrod for Labour – upped spend in social, and can now target people on Twitter via postcode.

For all the new media and tools that electoral campaigns are beginning to embrace, parties still concentrate their efforts on voters in the middle. The fact that those efforts are not making a noticeable difference to either party in the polls suggest they could do a far better job.

In order to win, political parties must move from a broadcast approach, where the same message is sent to the entire country, to a much more targeted approach where data can be used to have direct conversations with individuals on the things that matter most to them. While the Conservatives are spending around £100,000 per month on Facebook, users are getting the same banal updates that do little aside from document the electoral campaign. They could be a lot smarter with their messaging to talk about different manifesto points to different people.



David Cameron (@David_Cameron) With @NickFerrariLBC. You can only ensure stable Government with me as PM & a brighter future by voting Conservative. pic.twitter.com/WhMMIkcIzf

Outside the realm of political parties, technology such as data management platforms and demand side platforms help companies to find the exact consumer they want and better understand how to target them – meaning that they can create a personalised experience based on the data held. What might this mean for politics?

Smarter targeting: find the floating voter

The floating voter is no longer invisible. A few years ago, we could only really identify the vociferous minority who were willing to publicly voice their political opinions through social media. Now, with the influx of data, we can start to target the significantly larger group of ‘don’t knows’. Labour and the Liberal Democrats have started to use software like NationBuilder, which can match electoral rolls to online activity, but with the increased sophistication of online targeting methods that use machine-based learning, it is possible to be a lot smarter with targeting.

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In order to accurately identify floating voters to convert, parties would need to build a propensity model – a data tool that would help them understand what identifies a person as ‘unsure’ or ‘swayable’ and classify how likely they are to be at a particular end of the political spectrum. Rather than using a few data points, such as postcode, parties could build models that plug in tens of different data sets from across the internet, such as what online newspaper you read, where in the country you are, your age, what school you went to and even look for keywords such as ‘NHS’ in your Twitter feed.

Influencing voter behaviour

Once parties establish their data points they must create systems that constantly feed off data, to identify floating voters most likely to align with their policies and build algorithms to identify at what point a person is on the political spectrum and what type of communication might be most effective and contextually relevant.

This opportunity to understand the type of personalised message to relay and on what platform is the biggest missed opportunity for British political parties. To go even further, they could target people with their own social spheres of influence: understanding who in someone’s social circle is voting the way of the party and using that person as an advocate to help to influence behaviour. The Obama campaign used this tactic to great effect in 2012 with the Great Schlep campaign which urged young Jewish people to encourage grandparents living in Florida to vote Democrat.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Great Schlep campaign urged young Jewish people to encourage grandparents living in Florida to vote Democrat.

Making politics personal



The prospect that data presents is wider than just targeting: the real opportunity here is for parties to get to know the electorate better. And that could mean parties could focus their manifestos and even their leadership around popular opinion. It is widely held that politicians are out of touch with everyday lives. These new methods of understanding what really matters to people may go beyond the election and change the face of politics as a whole.

Adriana Coppola is a planner at SapientNitro

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