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Carol Davidsen on "The Optimizer"


Davidsen began negotiating to have research firms repackage their data in a form that would permit the campaign to access the individual histories without violating the cable providers’ privacy standards. Under a $350,000 deal she worked out with one company, Rentrak, the campaign provided a list of persuadable voters and their addresses, derived from its microtargeting models, and the company looked for them in the cable providers’ billing files. When a record matched, ­Rentrak would issue it a unique household ID that identified viewing data from a single set-top box but masked any personally identifiable information.