Ex-Cambridge Analytica gurus behind Realtors’ Stefanowski ads

A Connecticut Association of Realtors’ political affiliate paid $545,000 for media services in support of Bob Stefanowski’s campaign to a Texas firm headed by executives who ran Cambridge Analytica.

That’s the former consultancy mired in scandal over its allegedly improper use of Facebook users’ personal data, and the Facebook platform, to sway the election of President Donald Trump and the British Brexit referendum.

Does that mean we have the same sorts of voterpersuasion techniques happening in the race for governor that we saw in the presidential race? There’s some evidence of it, and anyway, it’s becoming more common as big data, politics and social media converge.

The payments by Realtors for Connecticut Political Action Committee were made over four days starting Oct. 15, the day the association announced its endorsement of Stefanowski, the Republican, against Democrat Ned Lamont.

The payments were made to CloudCommerce Inc., with a San Antonio address. They included $25,000 for a landing page, $90,000 for consulting and $430,000 for online media buys, according to reports filed with the State Elections Enforcement Commission.

Some of the payments were initially filed as having been paid to Data Propria Inc., at the same address in San Antonio, later changed to CloudCommerce. Data Propria, run by former key people from Cambridge Analytica, is a subsidiary of CloudCommerce — a publicly traded, penny-stock company with close ties to President Donald Trump.

Key insiders

The subsidiary was founded and is run by Matt Oczkowski, formerly the “head of product” at Cambridge Analytica. A May 29 press release from CloudCommerce announced the formation of Data Propria as a unit of the parent company — the same month when the Guardian reported Cambridge had closed.

The Associated Press reported in June that Data Propria includes at least four former employees of Cambridge Analytica, including Oczkowski and the head of data.

Brad Parscale, a member of the CloudCommerce board of directors, has been named Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign manager. He was the Trump campaign’s digital chief in 2015 and 2016, based in San Antonio, and was reportedly the operative who brought in Cambridge Analytica.

Stephen K. Bannon, the controversial former Trump top adviser, was a vice president of Cambridge Analytica involved in its funding, according to The New York Times and other sources.

The press release in May touted Oczkowski’s supposed breakthrough in using data to help Trump get elected, a claim disputed by some former Cambridge Analytica people in a New York Times report.

“Mr. Oczkowski...most notably ran the team of embedded technical specialists inside the Trump campaign that led to the scientific understanding of the eventual outcome of the election — a scenario that pundits missed,” the press release said.

Indeed, during the campaign, the world missed the fact that Cambridge Analytica had acquired and was improperly using personal data on at least 50 million Facebook users — to advance the Trump campaign. Those allegations came out in March of this year, in an investigation by the New York Times and the Observer of London.

Aggressive profiling

Cambridge Analytica advanced a technique known as psychographic profiling. Using data to divide large numbers of people into personality types, the firm would then target those people with ads aimed at exploiting traits such as fear and national pride.

More ominously, Cambridge Analytica was associated with privacy violations that led Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to have to apologize and explain how it happened to Congress, along with aggressive voter outreach including scare tactics and the planting of fake news.

We’d like to know whether Data Propria is now using those same techniques, and perhaps even that same ill-gotten data, in its work for the 17,000-member Realtors Association in favor of Stefanowski. Among the three payments reported in state filings, one, for $90,000, was for “modeling/segmentation” — terms closely associated with psychographic profiling as targeted people are divided into buckets.

On Sept. 17, the association, based in East Hartford, co-sponsored a debate in New Haven between Stefanowski and Lamont. Michael Barbaro, the association president and a New Haven brokerage owner, moderated the debate.

There are no allegations of impropriety in the political work of CloudCommerce and Data Propria, or in the Realtors’ PAC hiring the affiliated companies. There is no evidence that Stefanowski’s campaign has coordinated activities with the Realtors.

The payments, however, would appear to connect the dots between Stefanowski’s support network and the web of social media insiders who played an outsized role in Trump’s election.

Barbaro declined to comment on the hiring of CloudCommerce Thursday, saying the rules of the state Elections Enforcement Commission — absolutely no coordination with the candidate — mean he must remain mum. Data Propria and CloudCommerce did not respond to my separate requests for a comment.

The association, known as CT Realtors, is bipartisan, endorsing candidates across the spectrum on real estate issues only — mostly incumbents. In endorsing Stefanowski, it cited his overall economic plan — a promise to cut taxes — and specifically his opposition to new real estate conveyance fees.

The GOP internet

The payments by Realtors for Connecticut represent a significant chunk of business for Data Propria and CloudCommerce. In February, a previously registered PAC affiliated with the association paid $128,000 to Data Propria, not connected with Stefanowsi’s election. That was around the time the firm was forming.

Then on Oct. 10, the association’s new PAC, reconstituted as an independent expenditure group — able to raise outside money in unlimited contribution amounts — paid Data Propria $55,000 for a poll, state records show.

CloudCommerce, which acquired Data Propria soon afterward, is a small company with a total market value of $2.25 million. It had outside revenue totaling $3.4 million in the first six months of 2018. Shares were trading over-the-counter at 1.7 cents this week.

As for the Stefanowski campaign, Starting in October, 2017 and extending to last Friday, Oct. 26, it has spent at least $236,000 with Harris Media LLC, according to state filings. Harris is another Texas firm that was briefly hired onto the Trump campaign and has worked with a firm co-founded by Parscale, which Parscale later sold to CloudCommerce , earning him a board seat.

Victor Harris, 30, dubbed “the man who invented the Republican internet” in a 2014 Bloomberg profile, has provided digital media and consulting to Stefanowski’s campaign. At least one media account said Harris Media uses the same big-databased profiling as Cambridge.

What we’re seeing is the maturing of an arm of political marketing that was in the vanguard until 2016 and could be headed for the mainstream.