News from the Annenberg School for Communication
March 27, 2013
SPECIAL - Sasha Issenberg,
author of "The Victory Lab"
to speak at Annenberg
April 1 (5:30 p.m. in Room 109)
The technology exists to plot the next election, and Sasha Issenberg takes a close look at this subject. Issenberg reports how new technology can predict who will come out to vote, what messages they will respond to and, ultimately, set the course to victory.
Issenberg, author of the best seller "The Victory Lab" will talk on Monday, April 1 at Annenberg about this craft, how political analysts, relying on a tsunami of big data, can see where, how, and why Americans vote. He will be a lecturer at the Annenberg (Room 109 from 5:30 to 7 p.m.) He will be a guest lecturer in Comm 397, New Media and Politics.
ABOUT HIS TALK:
Nerds crash the gates of a venerable American institution, shoving aside its so-called wise men and replacing them with a radical new data-driven order. The Victory Lab follows the renegade academics and maverick operatives rocking the war room and re-engineering a high-stakes industry previously run on little more than gut instinct and outdated assumptions. Armed with insights from behavioral psychology and randomized experiments that treat voters as unwitting guinea pigs -and reams of new individual-level data fed into microtargeting algorithms-the smartest campaigns now believe they know who you will vote for even before you do. The Victory Lab presents a secret history of modern American politics, pulling back the curtain on the tactics and strategies used by some of the era's most important figures-including Barack Obama and Mitt Romney-with iconoclastic insights into human decision-making, marketing and how analytics can put any business on the road to victory.
ABOUT SASHA ISSENBERG:
Sasha Issenberg is the "Victory Lab" columnist for Slate and the Washington correspondent for Monocle, where he covers politics, business, diplomacy, and culture. He covered the 2008 election as a national political reporter in the Washington bureau of The Boston Globe, and his work has also appeared in New York, The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Monthly, Inc., The Atlantic, Boston, Philadelphia, and George, where he served as a contributing editor.
His first book, The Sushi Economy: Globalization and the Making of a Modern Delicacy, was published by Gotham in 2007.
If you plan to attend please rsvp to Debra Williams rsvp@asc.upenn.edu.
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