BREXIT’S B.C. ASSIST
Victoria tech firm lauded for its work
A small technology company in Victoria is being credited with helping Britain’s Vote Leave campaign secure an unlikely win in the Brexit referendum last June.
According to financial disclosures released by the British Electoral Commission, Vote Leave spent $5.7 million with AggregateIQ on the campaign to separate from the European Union.
The Leave campaign won with 52 per cent of the votes cast, even though most polls had favoured the Britain Stronger in Europe stay campaign.
“Even in the few weeks leading up to the vote it looked like it would go the other way,” said AIQ chief operations officer Jeff Silvester. “This particular client was pretty happy with the outcome.”
Good thing, too. AIQ received more money than any firm contracted by either side, more than 10 per cent of the $52 million spent on the campaign. AIQ received 11 contracts from Vote Leave and its affiliates, including the three largest payments made to any firm.
Leave campaign director Dominic Cummings was effusive in his praise for AIQ: “Without a doubt, the Vote Leave campaign owes a great deal of its success to the work of AggregateIQ. We couldn’t have done it without them.”
Silvester didn’t take time to ponder the larger implications of the work until well after the referendum was over.
“When you are doing the work you just have your head down doing the work,” he said. “It’s afterward when you start to think about it. It’s a bit humbling really to think that we’ve had an influence on history. Can you imagine, this tiny little company in Victoria having a global influence?”
Silvester — an assistant to former Liberal MP Keith Martin until 2011 — and co-founder president Zack Massingham registered the company in 2013.
“I worked on (B.C. Liberal) Mike de Jong’s leadership campaign as a data and technology guy,” said Massingham. “It was a small role in a great campaign that gave me a glimpse into the potential that existed to bring good business practices to campaigning.”
About $1 million of the Vote Leave budget was spent with AggregateIQ by independent campaigner Darren Grimes, a 23-yearold fashion design student at the University of Brighton, according to disclosure documents. Grimes had been tasked with rallying the youth vote for the Leave campaign, according to BuzzFeed News.
AggregateIQ helped Grimes target millennial voters.
“(They) used video advertising, Google Ads, landing pages on our website to inspire sign-ups and help us get out the vote on polling day using text messages and news- letters,” Grimes told BuzzFeed.
AIQ uses targeted marketing such as online advertising and social media to get its clients’ content in front of the right people.
“The client usually has a good idea of who they want to reach and what content they want them to see,” said Silvester. “We have all kinds of metrics that we can apply to an ad or any piece of campaign technology. It’s a whole suite of technological solutions.
“With Brexit, (Vote Leave) told us who they wanted to target and then we helped them test those messages and validate their assumptions,” he said. “After that, we go find the people they want to reach.”
AIQ had pitched Vote Leave before the British Electoral Com- mission selected them as the official Leave campaign body, so they were ready to hit the ground running.
“Once Vote Leave were selected, they came to us right away and asked us to work with them,” he said.
Silvester declined to say whether the company has worked with any local campaigns, but said they have done business in Canada, the U.S., the U.K., South America, Europe and Africa, for clients across the political spectrum.
“When we started we didn’t really envision working with a global market, but the world of technology and politics is not that big and if you help someone everybody knows,” he said.