Your TV Is Spying On You

Political messaging is moving back to the living room.

After an election in which Internet tactics seemed to captivate the public, political strategists are turning—or perhaps more accurately, returning—their attention to television advertising. TV isn’t sexy. Or at least, it hasn’t been lately. But with coming developments in user tracking and Internet-ready appliances, that’s going to change.

Even as more people ditch their traditional set-top boxes for online options like Netflix, Americans are actually watching more TV than they used to. In 2012, the average household spent 2 hours and 50 minutes consuming television, up 5 minutes from the previous year.

Quality content is partly behind the surge. So is our growing appetite for binge-watching. But, as Netflix’s famous gamble with House of Cards revealed, it’s behavioral data that has the biggest potential to keep our eyes glued to the screen. As a result, just as Web-browsing data came to the aid of political campaigns in the last electoral cycle, so will our television-watching habits in the next.