This article appeared in Street Fight. Read it in full here.
The effects of a dock strike (averted for now) could have been one of those situations that changes the course of a presidential election. In 2016, then FBI Director James Comey investigated Hillary Clinton’s use of her personal email system in her role as Secretary of State. It was a major factor in swinging the election for President Donald Trump, according to Resonate, which has predicted the winners of the last two U.S. presidential elections.
In 2020, Resonate’s data on consumer sentiment showed that Hispanic sub segments were a major factor in the Florida results.
“All Hispanic-Americans do not hold the same beliefs or behave the same way,” said Resonate CMO Ericka McCoy. “Trump had more support in predominately Cuban areas like Miami vs. neighborhoods that had a more predominately Puerto Rican families in the Orlando area.” One theory is that in the aftermath of 2017’s Hurricane Maria, which slammed Puerto Rico, a sense of abandonment [by the Trump administration] may have affected voting decisions.
Resonate, a consumer-data and intelligence platform with a dataset of more than 250 million U.S. individuals, predicted a Joe Biden victory for President.
McCoy said she and her colleagues have a good idea, based on the current data, of who will win the election this November. She won’t disclose that information now but said the company will announce its prediction in two weeks. What she did say, was that its real-time voter sentiment data indicates strong concerns about the economy, and that what she calls “quiet quitters” – those who decide not to vote this time – will have a significant impact on the outcome.
Resonate also works with top-tier brands like AT&T, Mattress Firm, and AAA to uncover target audiences. McCoy sat down with StreetFight to talk more about the company’s capabilities.
How long has Resonate used this technology in the political sphere?
Since our inception [in 2008] our goal was understanding why people make the decisions they make. And that could be a decision to vote or protest or buy something. Look out the window and think about the last couple of years, the pandemic, politics, geopolitical issues. How have they affected the way that you live your life? How has that affected the way consumers shop? Having that ability to know why people are making the decisions they make and predict what they’ll do next based on all of these different variables is something we’ve pursued since the beginning.
Why do you think “quiet quitters” are going to affect the election?
The ability to engage them and to target them with messages that are really critical, that really resonate with them, could be a game changer because at the end of the day, they have motivations. And even after the change in [the Democratic] ticket, they still are not voting [but] there are issues that are important to them. And if you can just deliver that right message to them that may be the difference in getting them to vote.
Tell me more about current voter sentiment.
People are feeling pressure from inflation. Every single night, we’re calibrating how people are feeling about the economy. We didn’t set out to be election predictors. But we wanted to test our precision. Like how effective we could be at the most complicated sorts of things to predict. And that’s really how we ended up predicting the election. We started by predicting the 2016 presidential election, and we were accurate. The reason we were more accurate than Nate Silver or those guys is because we were able to account for real-time things that were happening in a way that traditional research could not do. [People] still feel economic pressure. They still feel pessimistic about the economy regardless of the fact that we appear to have avoided a recession. Most consumers and voters do not recognize that. And so, that is a really big challenge. Immigration, and then, geopolitical issues [Ukraine, the Middle East] obviously are key too.
How is AI disrupting your business?
Our history actually is rooted in predictive analytics and AI. So, we’ve actually been doing it for quite a long time. We didn’t talk about it as much because it was not well understood until ChatGPT. We have continually invested in and worked to advance our use of AI for more than a decade. We’ve built an AI-based infrastructure that we call “rAI,” which is what’s called a fine-tuning model. It’s almost a living breathing, detailed understanding of consumers and how they live their lives. We like to say we understand the past, we know what’s happening now, and we predict the future.
How has Resonate worked with a brand marketer to accurately target audiences or subsets of audiences?
We have a client in the travel industry space. They manage a number of brands across various travel subcategories. And they have very specific needs that they need to fill with those different types of travel categories. So you may have a premium category or a land-versus-sea offer.
That client uses a number of our products. Our data helped them to better understand how to engage multicultural travelers and bring them to specific categories that they sell. They also use our data to retain people who moved into other travel categories, and they need to get them back.
A really cool new offering that [we have] is going to be incredibly competitive in a specific market. [Clients] can use our data to understand the difference between their existing customer base and that competitor customer base. So not only what is different, but what is similar and where are their opportunities to leverage. Different messaging, different offers, different positioning to attract and prevent the defection of their customers.
