Just in time for the 2012 election campaign, a suburban Washington, D.C., company has pulled in $20 million and the services of a pioneer in the online world to answer one of the most elusive questions in politics or marketing: Why do consumers or voters buy or vote the way they do?

Revolution Growth, founded by former AOL executives including Steve Case and Ted Leonsis, who in the 1990s turned AOL into the dominant Internet company, led the $20 million funding round for Resonate.

The money will be used to build out Resonate’s ability to analyze so-called big data to find the explanations for people’s behaviors that can then be translated into targeted advertising. Previous investors Greycroft Partners and iNovia Capital also participated in funding for Resonate, headquartered in Reston, Virginia, and founded in 2008.

As important as the money is the expertise the company is bringing onto its board in Leonsis, the former AOL vice chairman and cofounder of Revolution.

Leonsis told Portfolio.com that Resonate hit a number of sweet spots for him as an investor: among them, an experienced, Washington-area team of entrepreneurs, a hot market in advertising technology, and revenue doubling year over year.

“We wanted to speed that up so that the company could be looking at horizons in the billions instead of the hundreds of millions [of dollars],” Leonsis said.

It means the campaign managers who run the flood of advertising that’s coming this year will have a new tool to more effectively target their messages, and Resonate will have at least a puncher’s chance of capturing some of the more than $1 billion that will be spent on advertising in the elections.

Beyond the elections, company marketers should be able to use Resonate’s platform to target campaigns for goods and services to consumers.

“Savvy marketers don’t need more data. They need breakthrough insights into why people act and why they don’t,” said Bryan Gernert, CEO of Resonate.

And Leonsis said while the advocacy and campaign spending attendant with the political season should help the company, it’s not the reason he put money into it. The real, long-term growth opportunities are in gathering and providing intelligence about customers to corporate marketers.

“For this company to be of scale, it needs to be able to touch corporate and branding,” Leonsis told Portfolio.com

Leonsis, the Brooklyn-born son of Greek immigrants, knows a little something about what works online. He’s been at it since pretty close to the beginning of the World Wide Web. Redgate Communications, the company he founded in the early 1990s, was purchased by Case’s AOL in 1993, and Leonsis spent the next 14 years as an AOL executive, including running the Advertising.com division after AOL bought it; that company was a pioneer in using algorithms to track online consumer behavior, as Google and others do now.

Leonsis sees Resonate as a next step in that continuum, applying mathematics to predict what will chime with consumers based on such behavior as their opt-ins to new sites or products.

“It’s not dependent on cookies and tracking, it’s based on psychographics and people opting in to fill out these profiles,” he said. “They had a very unique approach.”

Since his days at AOL, Leonsis has expanded well beyond the Internet. He’s the majority owner of the Washington Capitals hockey team and the NBA’s Washington Wizards, as well as participating in Revolution’s activities.

The philosophy behind Revolution—founded by Case, Leonsis, and fellow AOL veteran Donn Davis—is to put money into companies that can “change the world” and give consumers more choice and control in their lives.

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Kent Bernhard Jr. is News Editor of Portfolio.com