Obama Campaign's Tech Team Wins Webby Award

The Obama for America 2012 tech team was widely lauded as a major factor in helping to elect the president to a second term, and Tuesday night they were recognized for their efforts at the 17th Annual Webby Awards.

Obama's tech team, which operated out of the campaign's Chicago headquarters, received the Webby Breakout of the Year Award. Michael Slatby, Harper Reed and Teddy Goff were on hand to accept the award with the maximum five-word acceptance speech.

Winning at the Webby Awards, held annually in New York, is a major accomplishment for tech and internet industry insiders, but it also manages to attract big names in the political and entertainment worlds.

Aside from providing the strongest commentary on the running theme of the night -- whether the word GIF should be pronounced with a soft or a hard G -- the tech team has a lot of reasons to pat themselves on the back.

The team is known for its cutting-edge use of data, which helped the winning campaign apply analytics in creating election simulations and to make more efficient decisions on deploying assets.

Senior campaign strategist David Axelrod told the Chicago Sun-Times that using the data models the team created helped "save tens of millions of dollars in targeting voters using social media and broadcast ads."

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