About
Carol Davidsen has spent two decades inside the systems that decide what people see, pay, and are targeted with, moving from telecom billing to audience measurement and privacy to enterprise customer data architecture. She built the targeting platform that let the 2012 Obama campaign microtarget television advertising down to the household, then spent the next decade building the governed customer data infrastructure that lets large, regulated institutions actually know their own customers instead of guessing. The thread running through both is not a single tool. It is a pattern: translate a business problem into a data architecture, evangelize and sell the case for it to the people who have to fund it, then lead the engineers who design and ship it. Use case and deployment, pitch and platform, in roughly equal measure, which is rarer than either skill alone.
She is a native New Yorker and the parent of a ten-year-old, a personal stake that sharpens how she looks at this world: not just the technology, but the revenue a data product generates, the billing and licensing that funds it, the segmentation and models that quietly decide who we're assumed to be and the paths we get sorted down, and the regulatory and audit trail that has to justify all of it after the fact.
Writing
Essays on data, AI strategy, and the economics underneath both — written from two decades spent building the data infrastructure behind political campaigns, television advertising, and enterprise customer platforms.
-
The Cost of Search: An Old Economics Problem at the Center of AI Strategy
A 1961 theory about why buyers stop searching for a better price explains more about AI strategy today than most AI strategy itself does — including why trust, billing, and personalized pricing are all the same problem wearing different clothes.
Talks & research
-
Personal Democracy Forum, June 2015
A talk on the ethics and mechanics of large-scale political data targeting.
-
Journal of Advertising Research, 2016
The Power of Political Advertising: Lessons for Practitioners
Peer-reviewed research drawing practitioner lessons from political advertising targeting.
Press & recognition
Coverage of her work on political data and television advertising, from the 2012 Obama campaign through the 2018 Facebook data-privacy hearings.