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Election campaigning and direct marketing |
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If direct marketing tools works for commercial purposes, why should they not be used in election campaigns? Why not gain people's votes by political statements tailor-cut to suite the attitudes and values of a voter? The Republican Party of Missouri, USA, has already tried it out. As the Washington Post  reported on 10 October, 2000, the party purchased personal data from the data body company TransUnion and fed them into a computer programme capable of inferring political likes and dislikes from the kind of social, demographic and economic data warehoused by TransUnion. The software is offered by Map Applications, Inc. and has already been successfully used by the arms lobbying group National Rifle Association. The logic of customised reality of direct marketing is finally beginning to directly affect the democratic process, the consumer merges with the citizen.
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Bertelsmann
The firm began in Germany in 1835, when Carl Bertelsmann founded a religious print shop and publishing establishment in the Westphalian town of Gütersloh. The house remained family-owned and grew steadily for the next century, gradually adding literature, popular fiction, and theology to its title list. Bertelsmann was shut down by the Nazis in 1943, and its physical plant was virtually destroyed by Allied bombing in 1945. The quick growth of the Bertelsmann empire after World War II was fueled by the establishment of global networks of book clubs (from 1950) and music circles (1958). By 1998 Bertelsmann AG comprised more than 300 companies concentrated on various aspects of media. During fiscal year 1997-98, Bertelsmann earned more than US$15 billion in revenue and employed 58.000 people, of whom 24.000 worked in Germany.
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