• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, March 17, 2014

Speaking MediaPost’s Marketing Health conference, Adam Stalker, national digital director of Enroll America, says the group --- which markets Americans to sign up for health insurance -- used the lessons from gathering big data for the Obama Presidential advertising campaigns.

But it wasn’t enough.

Stalker says the goal in targeting the 41 million Americans came down to 12 states where two-thirds of people weren’t insured. More specifically it focused on 10 states and started knocking on doors-- this supplemented by a paid-media campaign.

But the results were difficult -- almost at the outset.

“The problem was we didn’t prioritize the most basic parts of a direct mail campaign,” says Stalker. “We needed to go back to the basics. The things that works is [simply]: display and lead generation tactics. We simply targeted the zip codes for the high uninsured.”

It wasn’t that big data didn’t work, says Stalker, but that some of supplemental efforts failed. For example, Stalker also said it was hard to find the uninsured online -- even millennials.

Not only that but “admittedly our budget is small. We have to be very very efficent. Volume was the key. We needed to have as many conversations as possible.  We weren’t able to reach influencers with a one on one approach.”

Now, he says the health care campaign has improved greatly, now reaching one million people in ten states. “The rate of adoption as skyrocketed now as the deadline has neared.”