Schmidt invests in Obama campaign data analysis Team

On June 2, Google's executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, invested $ millions of in the Obama campaign data Analysis team and set up a consultancy firm Civis Analytics to help the large data professional team open up the market for businesses and non-profit industries.

During the 2012 U.S. presidential election, Mr Schmidt was an Jim Messina in Obama's re-election campaign, and he played a role in the details of the campaign team's career, selection strategy, and training campaign director Jim Messina. Mr Schmidt has been instrumental in the campaign data Analysis team led by Dan Wagner (Dan Wagner), which helped Obamara 5 million votes.

After the presidential election, Schmidt made a full plan for the data analysis team, spending millions of of dollars to keep the core of the team, and set up a new consultancy firm, Civis Analytics, which was run by Wagner and employs more than 20 of his former subordinates. The employees share Civis Analytics with Mr Schmidt, who is an independent investor.

The goal is to make the big Data professional team that once led the most expensive presidential campaign in history to the corporate, non-profit sector. This group of like-minded, innovative and hardworking young people is a typical image of technological innovation, and the VCs are competing fiercely for such a group of people, and when you really find and understand what they really need, then they support them.

The data analysis team led by Wagner used an inverted strategy to consolidate large business and political databases to see if voters could support Obama or not to reject Mr Obama's views, and then pass Facebook and Email or visit for personal contact to persuade them to vote for Obama. Mr Schmidt said the data analysis team was using technology to influence the behaviour of people facing choices or problems. Mr Obama's defeat of Mr. Romney in the general election is a testament to how this technological insight has turned into a political advantage.

Schmidt said that Civis Analytics future business focus will be on the enterprise side, the choice of enterprises is often a A/b choice, with the help of these modern data tools, the answer will often be at a glance. He said that sophisticated data analysis would greatly contribute to logistics, scheduling, production and marketing decisions. The Obama campaign said it was using such data-analysis tools to increase the efficiency of the campaign media budget by 15% and save $ tens of millions of trillion in money.

Eric Johnson, head of the Digital Strategy Center at Dartmouth University's Dartmouth Eton, says the big data use is also good for the nonprofit sector. Dartmouth's Board of trustees hired Civis to study related topics through data analysis. At the same time, Civis is working with several other companies and non-profit organizations.

Of course, Civis will not completely leave the field of political data analysis. Wagner expects Civis to advise Democratic candidates in next year's midterm congressional elections.

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)