As I sat re-hashing the presidential election results with my parents last week over dinner, my mother pointed out that she found all the coverage of targeted election breakdowns of the population to be fascinating. “Look at all the information they gathered, about age, gender, sex and geography, and how they can break down the results,” she said. “That’s data gathering,” I replied. “That’s the kind of thing we cover at DMNews.”
And this morning’s New York Times positively crowed about Obama’s power to tap into social networks, not just for viral marketing purposes but for data gathering — now the President-elect has the contact information of millions of Americans that he can target directly. Direct marketing as Presidential power play!
Could the consuming public consider the universe of databases to be suddenly cool (as in, “Wow, look how many names she has!”)? Hmm.
