But, like most other advertising buyers, the Obama team knew that relying on demographics was terribly imprecise. They might be showing their ads mainly to hard-core Romney supporters. Or they might be showing them primarily to people who had already made up their minds to vote for Obama, which could also be wasteful. Relying on demographics meant relying on judgments and estimates so coarse that they were really little more than guesses: that eighteen- to twenty-four-year-old men were particularly up for grabs as a group during the election, or that viewers of Family Guy, or perhaps of
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