Thursday, March 22, 2018

Cambridge Analytica Is The Juicero Of Political Data Firms

If you ask anyone from the world Cambridge Analytica tried to inhabit - the highly competitive world of data consulting - about what Cambridge was offering campaigns, the story that emerges is very different.

"This is the real world, not a spy novel. And in the real world, what Cambridge Analytica was promising simply doesn't work," said Republican data consultant Patrick Ruffini.

"At the end of the day, Cambridge offered nothing more and nothing less than a standard data science program with a brilliant marketing campaign wrapped around it," Ruffini said.

' Kogan, who gathered the data by running a survey app on Facebook, also said he was being made a scapegoat by the social media firm and Cambridge Analytica.

So-called whistleblower Christopher Wylie - who was not even employed by Cambridge at this point - now claims they were still using this data for the Trump campaign in 2016, despite Cambridge's claims to the contrary.

It's unclear exactly how the data was used, but we know two things: the Trump campaign was not among its users, and the end product Cambridge was using the dataset to build, personality-based targeting, has been universally and spectacularly panned by a range of ex-Cambridge clients.

"The Cruz campaign had the best data-focused campaign that we've seen, and they barely used Cambridge for that. The standard Republican operating procedure turned out to work much better. I've said every negative thing in the world about Brad Parscale and Jared Kushner, but they had a very successful and innovative approach to Facebook and they pushed Cambridge aside."

http://thefederalist.com/2018/03/22/cambridge-analytica-is-the-juicero-of-political-data-firms/

No comments: