Counting Down the Election

With the Presidential campaign coming to an end, both candidates continue to learn everything they can about their potential supporters.

Both candidates have used data-mining techniques to customer ads for voters based on the digitals trails people leave as they visit Internet sites.

People who visit political websites have been known to receive more information about that particular candidate due to the “retargeting” software that was programed into the website.  The point of this software is to show people ads for certain sites or products that they have previously viewed.

While this is a good advertising strategy in the since it is an easy way to advertise and remind those people interested in you. The problem however, as mentioned in this New York Times article, is that “retargeting” sometimes follows people, who might not support the candidate but has visited the website just to take a look at it.

As the article mentioned, this data-mining tool has not been mastered yet, and is not completely accurate but does provide the candidates a quick and easy way to project their messages to a large population of people.