You can't escape the campaign ad

The Democratic National Committee met in Minneapolis (MN) the week of Aug 24. Among the items on the agenda was a strategy to transform the party’s voter databases into something they can use to target online ads. Republicans are doing something similar, all in an effort to catch voters who spend more time than ever online.

For political campaigns, television ads and robocalls just aren’t enough anymore. “You’d want to reach people on Facebook or LinkedIn or Twitter, or wherever they are talking to each other about political or other speech," says Nuala O’Connor of the Center for Democracy & Technology. She’s worried about merging voter details with the consumer data used to target online ads. And there’s a lot of data out there, says John Wonderlich of the Sunlight Foundation. “Anything that can tell you a slice about your identity as a person, a sophisticated data manipulator can use to make inferences about your identity as a voter or a citizen," he says.