Member Article

Obama's tech wizard on why "ideas are cheap"

How do you build a winning US Presidential campaign through technology, and what might this teach businesses?

At The Economist’s Technology Frontiers event this week, Bdaily heard from Harper Reed, the chief technology officer of Barack Obama’s ‘Obama for America’ re-election campaign in 2012.

Reed superseded the 2008 man for the job, Michael Slaby, a very different character. While Slaby was suited and professional, Reed’s whacky bearded appearance made him “less of a political operative” and more of a technology engineer.

“The first thing I did, which was probably the most important thing, was to hire a lot of engineers. We had a team of about 40 people, and it was really important that we had a team of people who ‘aggressively’ knew what they were doing,” said Reed.

“We stood on the shoulders of giants by hiring people from Twitter, Google and Facebook, and we required them to know. There was no time to train.”

Reed was given 18 months to propel the campaign, and from a standing starting this was no mean feat.

He explained: “We had this idea to build a platform. That platform was called Narwhal - code names are really important because the press latch onto them and run with them - but it was an idea to build this large API platform to allow all our apps to interact with one another.

“It really gave us the freedom to develop our products, and not worry about sharing the data between them because it was all built in.”

Within this suite of apps was technology to connect users with voters; online field offices and data processing capabilities.

He added: “The challenge was: how do we connect this old and traditional campaign with the new and modern internet. How do we make sure we don’t lose those traditional ideas?

“One thing that resonated throughout everything we were doing was that failure was not an option.

“In 2008 some software had died so we had to spend some time thinking about how to make sure this didn’t happen. We invested aggressively and heavily in user experience…and we went through a number of exercises to make sure that we didn’t fail.”

Social media was used to “listen” to voters, so that Reed and his team could bring the conversation closer to their target audience.

This “micro-targeting” Reed says will change the face of media to become more “addressable,” where niche demographics can be targeted through content and directly talked to.

Reed noted that traditional forms of campaigning will eventually die out. Leafleting, door-knocking and advertising don’t address young voters effectively, and micro-targeting will be the way to solve this.

The ‘Obama for America’ campaign ran without downtime or technical difficulty, and of course it was a political success. Reed says that behind the success was strong team dynamic.

“Ideas are cheap, and execution is hard,” he noted. “We talk about big data a lot and it’s no longer hard to store data, so we should be talking about the results from it. Often conversation revolves around ‘how big is it?’ That doesn’t matter if you don’t have answers and insights.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Tom Keighley .