Data played a major role. There's perhaps no better example than the constant testing of email subject lines. The performance of the Obama email with the subject line "I will be outspent" earned the campaign an estimated $2.6 million. Had the campaign gone with the lowest-performing subject line, it would have raised $2.2 million less, according to "Inside the Cave," a detailed report from Republican strategist Patrick Ruffini and the team at Engage.
Obama's embrace of analytics has caused a reckoning, particular for conservatives. It's not that other campaigns ignored data, but Chicago clearly made it a priority in a different way.
Politics didn't come up at the conference, except for a single question to Nate Silver, the FiveThirtyEight election oracle who got his start doing statistical analysis on baseball players. Silver suggested there wasn't much comparison between the two worlds.
But even if there's no direct correlation, there was an underlying message I heard consistently throughout the conference that applies to both: Data is an incredibly valuable resource for organizations, but you must be able to communicate its value to stakeholders making decisions -- whether that's in the pursuit of athletes or voters.
Data is an incredibly valuable resource, but you must be able to communicate its value to stakeholders making decisions
Despite all we hear about sports statistics like WAR and QBR -- to name two of the less obscure figures -- there's still resistance to analytics in many sports franchises. Several speakers explored ways to overcome this challenge, from convincing owners of the importance of analytics to hiring more data scientists.
But that wasn't a unanimous view. Paraag Marathe, chief operating officer of the San Francisco 49ers, advised students to take classes in negotiations and organizational behavior rather than devoting more time to analytics courses. Figure out how to solve a problem, he said. That's what Marathe has tried to do for the team that came within five yards of winning this year's Super Bowl. Moneyball wasn't making the case for on-base percentage in baseball, noted Aaron Schatz, founder of the data-rich site Football Outsiders. The point of Michael Lewis's bestselling book was to find market efficiencies -- to get an advantage over the other team.
Sound familiar? It's exactly what Obama was doing in his reelection campaign.
The campaign left nothing to chance. Each night in the final stretch of the race, Obama's analytics team ran 66,000 simulations through its computers to have a fresh perspective on the battleground states. That real-time data then drove decisions on how to spend money and make it count.
"We were going to demand data on everything, we were going to measure everything," Jim Messina, Obama's campaign manager, said last fall. "We were going to put an analytics team inside of us to study us the entire time to make sure we were being smart about things."