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latest abney and associates technology news Google's Eric Schmidt Invests in Obama's Big Data Brains During the 2012 campaign, Barack Obama's reelection team had an underappreciated asset: Google's (GOOG) executive chairman, Eric Schmidt. He helped recruit talent, choose technology, and coach the campaign manager, Jim Messina, on the finer points of leading a large organization. "On election night he was in our boiler room in Chicago," says David Plouffe, then a senior White House adviser. Schmidt had a particular affinity for a group of engineers and statisticians tucked away beneath a disco ball in a darkened corner of the office known as "the Cave." The data analytics team, led by 30-year-old Dan Wagner, is credited with producing Obama's surprising 5 million-vote margin of victory. For all its acclaim, the analytics team's main achievement is often misunderstood as "microtargeting" or some variant on wooing voters. This reverses the relationship between campaign and voter at the heart of Wagner's method. Recent campaigns have employed a top-down approach to identify what they thought were vital demographic groups such as "soccer moms." Wagner's team pursued a bottom-up strategy of unifying vast commercial and political databases to understand the proclivities of individual voters likely to support Obama or be open to his message, and then sought to persuade them through personalized contact via Facebook (FB), e-mail, or a knock on the door. "I think of them as people scientists,'' says Schmidt. "They apply scientific techniques to how people will behave when confronted with a choice or a question." Obama's rout of Mitt Romney was a lesson in how this insight can translate into political strength. Traditional marketing has the same inherent limitation as traditional campaigning: It's impossible to appeal to everybody, even among the groups likeliest to favor a product. "Budweiser might target football fans with an ad s