It turns out that if you scarf down Resee’s Peanut Butter Cups and watch “Modern Family” on Hulu on Sunday evenings, you could be more likely to prefer one presidential candidate over another. In an era where 15 terabytes are generated on Facebook each day, it’s not surprising that acute trends can be drawn to forecast the future of an individual’s decisions.

Big Data is a phenomenon that involves the collection and analysis of massive amounts of data. The private sector, and especially the advertising industry, has employed this tactic in an effort to gain superior insight into prospective consumers’ minds.

These data are collected from Internet browsers, social media behavior and mouse clicks from across the web. Startups are springing up across the country with a common goal in mind: interpreting. Small companies are spending millions of dollars “perfecting” algorithms to either assist corporations with their marketing strategy or detect patterns that may help political campaigns.

The rationale for integrating Big Data analytics into political campaigns is a novel concept. Learning more about independent or undecided voters helps a campaign more accurately uncover their core beliefs. This information can better shape a politician’s speeches, ads or debate answers and hopefully sway potential voters.

One of the fallacies that exist is on a macro level. If you identify the cross section of buyers who care about the environment, and chart them against the percentage of pretzel-eating, mid-20-year-olds, that does not necessarily outline the voters’ stance on offshore drilling.

Big Data can provide tremendous resources to a political campaign by enlightening experts to the advantages of targeting ads to certain voter communities. But overanalyzing data can lead to numbness across an audience.

One of the common misconceptions about Big Data is that the vast amounts of data can be used to sway minds. Targeting voters can reinforce a position about a candidate, but it is much more challenging to actually change their minds.

Behavioral psychologists call this the confirmation bias, meaning it is incredibly difficult to completely change perceptions with advertising. This is because people listen to commercials that share their similar views.

The Washington Post published an article earlier in the election season examining browsing habits and how they might correspond to political views. On the spectrum including Buzzfeed and Tumblr, users typically support President Barack Obama. This election season, news agencies have flocked to random studies and surveys in an attempt to make connections between political candidates and random behaviors.

Many social media giants have gotten into the Big Data game by creating their own strategy conquering public perception. The Twitter Political Index serves as a barometer for each candidate’s influence. Throughout each day the index is adjusted to show how the Twittersphere is leaning at any given time.

Big Data can be enormously useful to corporations and political campaigns because it has the ability to relate two seemingly variables and forge a correlation. Since data are predictable and logical, they hardly resemble us as people. People are random, unpredictable and therefore, each voter’s individual story is confounded when objectified through statistics.

Jared Rosen is a sophomore advertising and marketing management major. His column appears weekly. He can be contacted at jmrose03@syr.edu or followed on Twitter at @jaredmarc14.

Published on October 23, 2012 at 1:00 am

Contact Jared: jmrose03@syr.edu