• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, March 17, 2014

Data plays a major role in how President Barack Obama's administration targets uninsured consumers with messages on how to enroll in Obamacare. Officials began rolling out a campaign Monday to coincide with March Madness to help boost enrollment among basketball fans.

The White House told CNN the campaign officially gets underway when Univision Radio's Locura Deportiva airs an interview with President Obama Monday in hopes of spurring more Americans to sign up for healthcare before the March 31 deadline.

The campaign will run on television, radio, digital, online, and social media throughout the coming week. Chief of staff Denis McDonough, senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer, senior adviser Phil Schiliro, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius will play important roles in the campaign.

The United States Department of Health and Human Services will spearhead a major portion of the social media campaign through its Twitter and Facebook platforms. It aims to promote enrollment through National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) tournament graphics and other posts and paid promotions.

The Obama administration continues to market the health insurance message to Americans. Adam Stalker, national digital director of Enroll America, told MediaPost Marketing Health conference attendees Monday that the organization has been using data to determine where and how to reach the general public. It has tapped into lessons from gathering Big Data for the Obama Presidential advertising campaigns.

When the Enroll America campaign first began, Stalker said the team made the mistake of allowing data to drive the strategy rather than inform it. Data can help win elections and drive people to make decisions. "We raised a little more than $1.1 billion for the campaign, and $690 million was online only," he said. "Pages optimized within a pixel of its life, through heavily targeted email campaigns and online and offline paid media."

Data has allowed Stalker's team to identify friends of friends who supported the campaign living in states that are important to the reelection.

In terms of healthcare, there are 41 million under-served Americans, per Stalker. The group built a model based on publicly available and commercial data that provides information on consumers down to the household level. It told them about general demographics, purchasing habits and medical history. They surveyed 10,000 of the people from the data set and asked them about their insurance status.

The model allowed the group to score every individual in America and the likelihood of them being uninsured. They took the data and mapped it to identify where the consumers lived. The data identified two-thirds of the uninsured lived in 12 states; half in 114 counties. It also told the team getting them signed up required a lot of education to get people involved.

From there, the team launched the Get Card American campaigns focused on 10 states with field operations and paid media campaigns. The field team had a map of which doors to knock on and the online team had a list of cookies indicating in some way that the people on the other end of the browsers attached to the IP addresses were uninsured. It was done with data reaching out through social, display media, text messages and email, per Stalker.