An absolutely amazing look at the tech pile of each presidential candidate

The popular media coverage of the two recent US presidential elections confirms what our high school math teachers have always told us: Good for nerds.

Technology, from social media to “big data,” has become the new key to campaign success. This story holds true even among political pundits — some now call data enthusiasts like FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver the "real winners" of political elections since. they began to use technology and econometrics to predict outcomes as if they were creepy people hostage in the country Minority Report .

In politics, the story now goes, the candidate using the most nerd weapons wins.

But now, every candidate has jumped into the digital race — the same way soda brands and insurers do today. focus on new social platforms like Peach and Ello faster than the average teen — how true is the “high tech winning” hypothesis in 2016?

Above: The remaining US presidential candidates as of February 26, 2016.

The full coverage of technology's role in the 2016 election won't come until the smog has settled and Donald Trump launches a reality TV show about running the country. But since the similarities between campaign technology and brand marketing are so striking, I decided to map out each marketing technology stack of the current main contenders to see digital strategies. How are theirs different?

This is one of the worst things I've ever done, but it's also pretty fun.

This is the view of the president martech How does it look like.

Website Content Management

The backbone of every candidate's digital strategy is the website. (Behind the scenes, this created some jokes interesting, including forwarding JebBush.com to Donald Trump's website.)

Without fail, these candidate homepages do three things: solicit donations, request email addresses, and explain positions on political issues.

Here's how each website looks and what UX design emphasizes:

Here is the content management software our candidates are using:

Interestingly, Clinton appears to be using recruiting software as her content management system, repositioning GreenHouse as an all-in-one CMS. It's unclear what Carson and Trump are using to power their content, although the source code suggests that Carson may be using HubSpot (marketing automation) for his content in addition to email marketing. It's entirely possible that Trump's website is powered by his hair.

Follow users

When you visit any website, your visit will be tracked by the website owner. Sometimes that website will add a “cookie” to your web browser, which means it will track some of your activities on the web or remember you when you return. This is why you are often tracked across the web with ads after you visit HillaryClinton.com.

Here's how much tracking technology each candidate uses on you when you visit her or his website:

Clinton is tracking the most user data of any candidate, with a total of 14 analytics scripts running on her site. Every candidate uses Google's tracking feature. Optimization (split testing), Mixpanel (analytics and conversion tracking insights), and CloudFlare (who knows?) are also popular options.

User interaction

Political candidates want to mobilize voters and donors, attracting more cause supporters — just as a consumer brand like Coca-Cola wants people to talk about Coke when they think about soda. and buy Coke when they're thirsty.

So in addition to tracking when you visit their website, candidates want you to think about them as often as possible. They also want to use you as a conduit to reach your friends. Just like Coca-Cola, political candidates use technological tools to do this.

Here's what each is using to manage user engagement:

I cannot detect (with reasonable accuracy) which social media management system each campaign uses, but given the volume of social activity the candidates are managing, we have can be reasonably certain that each campaign is reducing $5,000 to $10,000 per month on a system like Sprinklr or Hootsuite or Tracx — with the exception of Mr. Trump, who is certainly managing all the accounts by hand.

I'm also guessing that Sanders is using the populist SMMS, Buffer, run by his niece.

Here are all the ad platforms each candidate installed, according to data from BuiltWith:

The chart above doesn't take into account how much each candidate is spending on actual ads, but just the software they have installed on their website, which tells us about the platform they're on. Carson famously announced that he would focus on Facebook ads at the start of his campaign. Not a terrible call as most Americans use Facebook, where advertising is cheap. Others, like Clinton and Cruz, have opted for a “wave coverage” approach.

Affect

I went ahead and did some data research on the digital influence each candidate has right now.

Clinton has a little more "influence" than the rest (in the way people react to her online content and social media), although Trump has the most followers and Sanders has the most followers. most shared documents.

External factors can also significantly affect a candidate's digital influence, such as when a candidate says something Twitter Worth in a televised debate. Donald Trump practically gambled the entire primaries by saying so many crazy things that he forced the media to cover him for free, which the Internet happily spread.

Sometimes digital influence is weird or whimsical, as I found in my analysis my recent about how people are more active on Google searching for "Donald Trump's hair" than searching for "Marco Rubio". The effect comparison with technology doesn't necessarily point to a cause-and-effect relationship, but the correlation says something interesting about the different strategies each candidate decided to - or could - use.

There is one more thing we should mention. In the pre-Internet era, politicians with better access to voter databases by phone or mail tended to have an edge over their competitors. The internet has made it possible for Obama, and now every candidate, to have richer ways to drill into that same kind of data, reach people via email, and target them through Internet advertising. . These voter databases are a goldmine, and the technology to build, access and mine them is becoming increasingly common during campaigns.

Historically, the candidate who can collect and leverage the most exclusive data has an edge. Each candidate presumably has its own database of supporter information as well as access to political party databases.

What's interesting here isn't the actual database technology — which doesn't seem to have changed much — but the resources candidates put behind it. If you think of volunteers and field workers as small cookie collectors who go door to door collecting data to feed into larger databases, resources become a big issue for campaigns. translate because the more money you put into collecting similarity data, the more powerful your technology will be.

Perhaps the lesson for the rest of us is one of the most important concepts data enthusiasts talk about: Garbage in, garbage out. Your technology will only be as good as what you put into it. If you're a content marketer with great technology but little content, you'll probably lose out to competitors with comparable or even worse technology but great content.

I'm not saying Trump's content is great, but he is pushing his relatively light tech background with highly original content (speech, thesis, etc.) very specific — in his case angry voters and voting. For better or worse, Trump's content meets them all the “shareability” requirements that I write here and delivered great results compared to other boring content candidates. Hillary, who is voting the highest of all the candidates right now, has moved away from her historically polarizing political approach, so the use of technology (and large advertising budgets) maybe just what helps her keep the conversation going.

I will not go ahead as a clairvoyant and predict which candidate will win in the end. A lot will happen before election day. But I feel comfortable saying right now that some of the biggest winners in this election — and possibly many elections in the future — will be the software companies that sell to people. In a war with many opponents and increasingly escalating weapons, you have to pay to become a weapons dealer.

Shane Snow is an award-winning journalist and co-founder of Content . If you liked this post, subscribe to his blog, ManEatingRobot, by email or get a free chapter of his bestseller .