Principles for Scholarly Collaboration with Political Marketing Companies

The next speakers in this iCS Symposium are Anamaria Dutceac Segesten and Michael Bossetta, who describes the decline of API access as a possible blessing in disguise, as it forces us to explore new and additional sources of data on online communication. One approach to doing this is to pursue academic partnerships with commercial enterprises – for instance, with news publishers or civil society organisations.

This project worked in partnership with a political marketing company that provides data-driven political marketing strategies for actors in multiple countries around the world. The company develops its own tools and gathers its own data for this, and therefore scholarly engagement with the company does not conflict with any of the mainstream social media platforms’ Terms of Service; it also offers insights into comparatively underresearched political and media systems in countries outside the Global North.

The company is developing this into a software-as-a-service platform that can be made available to the political clients; its strategy team sells to the candidate a vision of who they could be, and then develop the software tools for achieving that vision. This builds first on country-level research, including especially also research into the media environment and social issues. This is correlated with the client’s needs, and developed into a strategic objectives paper.

Selling the data-driven idea to the client depends on the personal relationship with the client, as well as the vision articulated. Once the client is signed up, the content and branding is developed, and media space is bought; the success of this is assessed through polling and analytics tools, focussing also on developing a representative sample of voters. Sample participation is gamified and incentivised to attract participants, and the sample is polled on various campaign issues as required.

Such participants receive a set of short survey questions every day (including political and apolitical questions: participants are unaware of the mainly political intent of the survey), and are asked to participate in on-the-spot surveys around special events; these feed into weekly reports on current campaign trends. There is a role for academics in the assessment of such insights: the company has more data than it can work with in the short timeframe of an election campaign, and scholars can draw on these data especially for more longitudinal and cross-context analyses.

But researchers must also make sure that in working with such companies they act ethically themselves, and do not support unethical business practices – if such requirements are met, then the collaboration can be mutually beneficial as it provides some added legitimacy for the company and valuable data for scholarly research. In the present case, too, the company has very strong internal ethics, and scholars should resist on this, of course.