09/27/2023
Shining the Spotlight on Sergio Serrato, Our Head of Intelligence
“I’ve always loved data and counting things.
In high school, I was interested in student government and basically did the equivalent of polling by going through yearbooks and figuring out who would vote for me, who wouldn't, who was on the fence, who was persuadable, etc. I was elected to student government all four years!
At the same time, I was getting really interested in public policy and how it was influenced.
My friend’s mom worked for a political polling and consultancy organization. When I graduated from college, they were hiring and I went to work for them.
Not long after the 2004 election cycle, I had kind of burned myself out on politics and wanted to try something else, so I went into media research. I went to Los Angeles and started doing research for a media and entertainment company where I tested pilot episodes of TV shows and tracked video game console brands for favorability.
In that job, I realized for the first time I was much more technically inclined than my peers. I decided to get even more technical skills, even going to a web development bootcamp and learning to code.
In 2016, we all saw that polling can be really wrong. Pollsters knew they had to make some changes and, in 2019, I was recruited to join an organization that needed help with their technology to make polling and message testing better.
In early 2021, I wrote a memo about what I’d learned in the 2020 election. It was all about how Biden used message testing and personal targeting to win the election. It ended up being forwarded to (Iron Light Co-Founder and CEO) Ryan Green a few months later and we started talking.
Iron Light is an exciting, remarkable opportunity. My goal here is to help more organizations get a larger data set and use that data more effectively, which has been a huge missed opportunity in certain sectors. Some are cultivating a data culture to make better use of their resources to achieve their goals and they’re pretty effective, but other sectors have no equivalent.
Our primary mission at Iron Light is to help our clients remove limitations on human potential, and one of the ways we do that is we build models on sentiment. What a data scientist can do is take a question that was answered by a couple of thousand people and build a model to score an entire voter file. Now, instead of 2,000 people, you have a dataset of 240 million people – and you know who is persuadable.
But you have to tell a story if you want to persuade. You can’t just send a river of words to people, you have to know if it’s making inroads. That’s why I love Iron Light. It’s innovative in how we look at policy formations and advance them with a human touch.
People often have a lot of logical, rational, empirically sound reasons why a policy issue is better. But being able to humanize that and make that digestible and marketing it is where so many miss the mark.
Or they have until Iron Light.”
Sergio Serrato
Portland, Oregon
Head of Intelligence
