Puppets and braggadocio
It's difficult to know where to start with CA. The recorded admissions that the company
influenced elections in the United States, Kenya and Nigeria? Its genesis in the
shadowy world of lobbyists and political operatives; weaned on Richard Mercer's billions? Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's anodyne apology for the fact that his company allowed years of user
data to be harvested? Or perhaps the growing call for Facebook to be burdened with more regulatory oversight, or even to be
forcibly restructured?
Feel free to scroll back up here to explore all these topics at your own leisure. But for now we're exploring why we shouldn't really be all that surprised about the CA revelation, and why we should expect more of the same. It all starts with a decades-long quest by marketers to build personalised ads.
The 'segment of one'
This is the holy grail for marketers. In the parlance of the profession the 'segment of one' (or, hyper-personalisation') refers to the delivery of a tailored marketing message to each consumer. And it consists of two key ingredients: the ability to build complex and rich profiles of each consumer, and the capacity to deliver ads to that consumer in disarming ways.
A century ago John Wanamaker, a pioneer in Marketing, said "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half." Fast-forward ten decades and today the heady mix of mobile internet connectivity, smartphones and social media platforms is giving shape to what was once a pipe-dream. This current scandal shows just how close marketers are to achieving that 'segment of one'. CA boasted that it had 5,000 data points on every voting-aged American.
Cookie-cutters to track cookies
Breakthroughs in communication technologies over the last century have afforded marketers dazzling new opportunities. Yet all mass marketing - whether on radio, television or mobile - is by virtue of its reach prescriptive. It's a one-size-fits-all approach that consumers have become attuned to: we see ads and instantly register that there is a company trying to sell a product or service. It's exactly this evaluative response that marketers are now trying to circumvent. To quote another famous ad man, David Ogilvy, "
A good advertisement is one which sells the product without drawing attention to itself."
Now consider this, if you have a rich-enough data profile of your prospective customers - their shopping habits, their beliefs, their weaknesses, their tastes, and even their fears - you can craft subtle-enough (or, perhaps, agreeable-enough) messages that slip under their radar and embed themselves in their minds. Witness for example the case of Elgar Welch who turned up and fired shots at a DC pizzeria in the brainwashed belief that it was the site of a child-sex ring.
Backtracks and admissions
The outcome described above was not accidental - it was the result of messages that were intentionally manipulative. Manipulation that CA strove for, and was paid for. We would call this propaganda if it was, say, the National Security Agency's cyber warfare division that was in the spotlight rather than Facebook.
In a particularly offensive Twitter post CA staff wrote, "Advertising is not coercive; people are smarter than that." But coercion is in fact at the heart of targeted advertising: contrary to the notions of choice in a consumer society, success for marketers is fast becoming a question of whether they can make the decision for you. We can't put this any better than CA themselves did. In their brilliant expose the UK's Channel 4 News secretly filmed CA executive Mark Turnbull touting his wares. In his own words, "we just put information into the bloodstream of the internet... It has to happen without anyone thinking,
'that's propaganda', because the moment you think
'that's propaganda', the next question is,
'who's put that out?'."
While CA is deserving of whatever punishment comes its way, it would be a huge mistake to simply scapegoat the company. It isn't an outlier, it's just an aggressive company pushing the envelope.
The new normal
This genie isn't going back in the bottle. Given the alleged efficacy of CA it's hard to see why unscrupulous players wouldn't emulate these methods. Nor is it clear that Facebook's
ever expanding effort to garner information about its users will be satisfied. The 50 million data profiles (we know of so far) that CA harvested from Facebook are just the beginning. As Bannon himself alleged yesterday, "
Facebook data is for sale all over the world."
What's interesting about this latest episode is that profile-based manipulation has now entered the domestic political arena in the US. Political manipulation has long been in the arsenal of organisations like the CIA tasked with making mischief in foreign lands. Now this same power is in the hands of political lobbyists and the weapons are aimed not overseas but at home.
We must wait to see whether this moment of reckoning is heeded; or whether marketers, campaign managers and propagandists continue
their headlong tumble toward 'segment of one' targeting. At inkl we've got a fair idea of which is the more likely.
