Data firm claims to predict leanings
Former employees say technology, used in Cruz presidential campaign, unproven
Standing before political and business leaders in New York last fall, Alexander Nix promised a revolution.
Many companies compete in the market for political microtargeting, using huge data sets and sophisticated software to identify and persuade voters. But Nix’s little-known firm, Cambridge Analytica, claimed to have developed something unique: “psychographic” profiles that could predict the personality and hidden political leanings of every American adult.
Capitalizing on its work for the man who is now president, Cambridge has pitched potential clients in the United States ranging from MasterCard to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Ahead of this year’s elections in Europe, Nix is promoting the 4-year-old U.S.based company abroad, too.
Cambridge Analytica’s rise has rattled some of Trump’s critics and privacy advocates, who warn of a blizzard of high-tech propaganda aimed at the American public, controlled by the people behind the alt-right hub Breitbart News. Cambridge is principally owned by billionaire Robert Mercer, a Trump backer and investor in Breitbart. Stephen Bannon, the former Breitbart chairman who is Trump’s senior White House counselor, served until last summer as vice president of Cambridge’s board.
But a dozen Republican consultants and former Trump campaign aides, along with current and former Cambridge employees, say the company’s ability to exploit personality profiles is exaggerated.
Cambridge executives now concede that the company never used psychographics in the Trump campaign. The technology remains unproven, according to former employees and Republicans familiar with the firm’s work.
Cambridge officials, in recent interviews, defended the company’s record during the 2016 election, saying its data analysis helped Trump energize critical support in the Rust Belt. But when asked to name a single race where the firm’s flagship product had been critical to victory, Nix declined.
“We bake a cake, it’s got 10 ingredients in it. Psychographics is one of them,” he said.
Cambridge’s parent company, the London-based Strategic Communication Laboratories Group, has a long record of trying to understand and influence behavior. Founded in 1993, the firm has worked for companies and candidates around the world, as well as for government and military clients. In recent years, the company has moved to exploit the revolution in big data to predict human behavior more precisely, working with scientists from Cambridge University’s Psychometrics Center. In 2013, Cambridge Analytica was created as SCL’s American operation, and the two companies today share offices in New York and Washington.
To develop its profiling system, Cambridge conducts detailed psychological surveys of tens of thousands of people, differentiating them by five traits. Uniquely, the company claims to be able to extrapolate those findings to millions of other people it has not surveyed, assigning them one of 32 distinct personality types. Cambridge then blends those profiles with commercial data and voting histories, revealing “hidden voter trends and behavioral triggers,” according to a 2016 company brochure.
Those profiles, in turn, would allow campaigns to customize advertising to prod the targeted voter toward a candidate. As the 2016 presidential campaign began, Cambridge landed a marquee client: Cruz, the Texas senator. Mercer seeded a super PAC with $11 million to support him.
But Cambridge’s psychographic models proved unreliable in the Cruz presidential campaign, according to Rick Tyler, a former Cruz aide, and another consultant involved in the campaign. In one early test, more than half the Oklahoma voters whom Cambridge had identified as Cruz supporters actually favored other candidates. The campaign stopped using Cambridge’s data entirely after the South Carolina primary.
After the Cruz campaign flamed out, Nix persuaded Trump’s digital director, Brad Parscale, to try out the firm. Its data products were considered for Trump’s critical get-out-thevote operation. But tests showed Cambridge’s data and models were slightly less effective than the existing Republican National Committee system.
Bannon at one point agreed to expand the company’s role, according to the aides, authorizing Cambridge to oversee a $5 million purchase of television ads. But after some of them appeared on cable channels in Washington, D.C. — hardly an election battleground — Cambridge’s involvement in television targeting ended.
At the moment, according to former employees, Cambridge has relatively few well-known corporate clients in the United States.
But Nix appears to have bigger ambitions. “I think we are on the cusp of something enormous,” he said.