CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA Political messaging based on personality was the key
The dealings that have been revealed between Cambridge Analytica and Facebook have all the trappings of a Hollywood thriller: a Bond villain-style CEO, a reclusive billionaire, a naïve and conflicted whistleblower, a hipster data-scientistturned-politico, an academic with seemingly questionable ethics and of course a triumphant president and his influential family.
Much of the discussion has been on how Cambridge Analytica was able to obtain data on more than 50-million Facebook users — and how it allegedly failed to delete this data when told to do so.
But there is also the matter of what Cambridge Analytica actually did with the data. The data-crunching company’s approach represents a step change in how analytics can be used as a tool to generate insights and to exert influence.
Pollsters have long used segmentation to target particular groups of voters, such as through categorising audiences by gender, age, income, education and family size. Segments can also be created around political affiliation or purchase preferences.
The data analytics machine that presidential candidate Hillary Clinton used in her 2016 campaign utilised the latest segmentation techniques to target groups of eligible voters in the same way Barack Obama had done four years before.
Cambridge Analytica was contracted to the Donald Trump campaign and provided a new weapon for the election machine. While it used demographic segments to identify groups of voters as Clinton’s campaign had, Cambridge Analytica also segmented using psychographics. As definitions of class, education, employment and age, demographics are informational. Psychographics are behavioural — a means to segment by personality.
Two people with the same demographic profile (for example white, middle-aged, employed, married men) can obviously have markedly different personalities and opinions. Adapting a message to a person’s personality — whether they are open, introverted or argumentative — goes a long way to help getting that message across.
To determine someone’s personality, traditionally you could either get to know them really well or they could be asked to take a personality test and to share it. Neither of these methods is realistically open to pollsters. Cambridge Analytica found a third way, with the assistance of two University of Cambridge academics. The first, Aleksandr Kogan, sold it access to 270,000 personality tests completed by Facebook users through an online app he had created for research.
Providing the data to Cambridge Analytica was, it seems, against Facebook’s internal code of conduct, but Facebook banned Kogan from the platform only in March.
Kogan’s data also came with a bonus: he had reportedly collected Facebook data from the test-takers’ friends. That added up to about 50-million people. These 50-million people had not all taken personality tests. This is where the second Cambridge academic, Michal Kosinski, came in. Kosinski, who is said to believe that microtargeting based on online data could strengthen democracy, had figured out a way to reverse engineer a personality profile from Facebook activity such as likes. Whether you choose to like pictures of sunsets, puppies or people apparently says a lot about your personality. On the basis of 300 likes, Kosinski’s model can predict someone’s personality profile with the same accuracy as a spouse.
Kogan developed Kosinksi’s ideas, improved them and cut a deal with Cambridge Analytica. Armed with this bounty and combined with additional data gleaned from elsewhere Cambridge Analytica built personality profiles for more than 100-million registered US voters. It’s claimed the company then used these profiles for targeted advertising.
If a segment of voters that is high in conscientiousness and neuroticism, and another segment high in extroversion but low in openness could be identified, people in each segment would be expected to respond differently to the same political ad. But on Facebook they do not need to see the same ad at all — each will see an individually tailored ad designed to elicit the desired response, whether that is voting for a candidate, not voting for a candidate or donating funds.
Cambridge Analytica worked hard to develop dozens of ad variations on different political themes such as immigration, the economy and gun rights, all tailored to different personality profiles.
There is no evidence that Clinton’s election machine had the same ability.
Behavioural analytics and psychographic profiling are here to stay, no matter what becomes of Cambridge Analytica. In a way it industrialises what good salespeople have always done, by adjusting their message and delivery to the personality of their customers.
This approach to electioneering — and indeed to marketing – will be Cambridge Analytica’s ultimate legacy.