Grand Theft Auto Republicans
by Patrick Ruffini :: April 30th, 2008 9:16 pmVia Jon Henke on Twitter, this Google Trends chart for “grand theft auto” is pretty interesting. Not only does it show a noticeable uptick surrounding the release of GTA IV this week, but check out the Top 10 states where people are Googling the game: Kentucky, Kansas, Michigan, Wisconsin, South Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Missouri, Indiana, and Oklahoma.
These were all Bush states in the last election, or were tossups. Who knew that Grand Theft Auto fans skewed Republican?
Last fall, I blogged about how free analytics data from social sites around the web, in this case Facebook’s advertising platform, could be used for behavioral targeting. (If you watch SportsCenter and worship the Star Wars trilogy, you’re probably a Republican, and if you’re into Colbert and Paris Hilton, you’re probably a Democrat.) Though Facebook has since pulled its segmentation by ideology after its ill-considered move towards open-ended political affiliation, and we only have geographic data to go by in Google Trends, this data may gain more mainstream acceptance since there is no more mainstream action online than Googling for something.
For instance, Julie Germany’s microtargeting riff at SXSW that vodka drinkers are Democrats and bourbon drinkers are Republicans is fully borne out by Google Trends. All ten of the top vodka states are blue states. And eight of the top ten bourbon states are red states. And I didn’t need some six figure study to tell me that.
Combine the lean Republican nature of Grand Theft Auto players with the hard Republican tendencies of bourbon drinkers, and you’ve just microtargeted bourbon drinking gamers as solid Republicans. (We already knew from the Facebook dataset that the gaming community skews conservative.)
Of course, any post titled like this is bound to be a little tongue in cheek. More recent GTA adopters do tend to be from bluer states, as seen in this April 2008 chart.
Other charts can help quantify what we intuitively already know. Check out Twitter’s top cities: San Fran, Austin, Seattle, Portland, New York, LA, DC, and Boston — the classic early adopter lineup.
Ever since the Bush campaign’s pioneering use of microtargeting in the ‘04 campaign, building the perfect model for political behavior from consumer data has been the holy grail of politics. The reams of data that’s only now just surfacing about consumers’ online behavior is making it a little easier, allowing, say, a Congressional campaign to perform basic targeting on their TV and online advertising.
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