- -
- 100%
- +
Nix paused and looked at Chester’s friends and at me, as if to let the number sink in.
But merely having Big Data wasn’t the solution, he said. Knowing what to do with it was the key. That involved more scientific and precise ways of putting people into categories: “Democrat,” “environmentalist,” “optimist,” “activist,” and the like. And for years, the SCL Group, Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, had been identifying and sorting people using the most sophisticated method in behavioral psychology, which gave it the capability of turning what was otherwise just a mountain of information about the American populace into a gold mine.
Nix told us about his in-house army of data scientists and psychologists who had learned precisely how to know whom they wanted to message, what messaging to send them, and exactly where to reach them. He had hired the most brilliant data scientists in the world, people who could laser in on individuals wherever they were to be found (on their cell phones, computers, tablets, on television) and through any kind of medium you could imagine (from audio to social media), using “microtargeting.” Cambridge Analytica could isolate individuals and literally cause them to think, vote, and act differently from how they had before. It spent its clients’ money on communications that really worked, with measurable results, Nix said.
That, he said, is how Cambridge Analytica was going to win elections in America.
While Nix spoke, I glanced over at Chester, hoping to make eye contact in order to figure out what opinion he might have formed of Nix, but I wasn’t able to catch his attention. As for Chester’s friends, I could see from the looks on their faces that they were duly wowed as Nix went on about his American company.
Cambridge Analytica was filling an important niche in the market. It had been formed to meet pent-up, unmet demand. The Obama Democrats had dominated the digital communications space since 2007. The Republicans lagged sorely behind in technology innovation. After their crushing defeat in 2012, Cambridge Analytica had come along to level the playing field in a representative democracy by giving the Republicans the technology they lacked.
As for what Nix could do for Chester’s friends, whose country didn’t have Big Data, due to lack of internet penetration, SCL could get that started for them, and it could use social media to get their message out. Meanwhile, it could also do more traditional campaigning, everything from writing policy platforms and political manifestos to canvassing door-to-door to analyzing target audiences.
The men complimented Nix. I was well enough acquainted with the two by now, though, to see how his pitch had overwhelmed them. I knew their country hadn’t the infrastructure to carry out what Nix was planning to do in America, and his strategy didn’t sound particularly affordable, even to two men with reasonably deep pockets.
For my part, I was shocked at what Nix had shared—stunned, in fact. I’d never heard anything like it before. He’d described nothing less than using people’s personal information to influence them and, hence, to change economies and political systems around the world. He’d made it sound easy to sway voters to make irreversible decisions not against their will but, at the very least, against their usual judgment, and to change their habitual behavior.
At the same time, I admitted, if only to myself, that I was gobsmacked by his company’s capabilities. Since my first days in political campaigning, I had developed a special interest in the subject of Big Data analytics. I wasn’t a developer or a data scientist, but like other Millennials, I had been an early adopter of all sorts of technology and had lived a digital life from my earliest years. I was predisposed to see data as an integral part of my world, a given, at its worst benign and utilitarian, and at its best possibly transformative.
I myself had used data, even rudimentarily in elections. Aside from being an unpaid intern on Obama’s New Media team, I had volunteered for Howard Dean’s primary race four years earlier, and then both John Kerry’s presidential campaign, as well for both the DNC itself and Obama’s senatorial run. Even basic use of data to write emails to undecided voters on what they cared about was “revolutionary” at the time. Howard Dean’s campaign broke all existing fund-raising records by reaching people online for the first time.
My interest in data was coupled with my firsthand knowledge of revolutions. A lifelong bookworm, I’d been a student forever but had always engaged in the wider world. In fact, I had always felt that it was imperative for academics to find ways to spin the threads of the high-minded ideas they came up with in the ivory tower into cloth that was of real use to others.
Even though it involved a peaceful transfer of power, you could say that the Obama election was my first experience of a revolution. I had been a part of the spirited celebration in Chicago on the night Obama won his first presidential election, and that street party of millions felt like a political coup.
I’d also had the privilege, and had sometimes experienced the danger, of being on the ground in countries where revolutions were happening silently, had just broken out, or were about to. As an undergraduate, I studied for a year in Hong Kong, where I volunteered with activists shuttling refugees from North Korea via an underground railroad through China and out to safety. Immediately upon graduating from college, I spent time in parts of South Africa, where I worked on projects with former guerrilla strategists who’d helped overthrow apartheid. And in the aftermath of the Arab spring, I worked in post-Gaddafi Libya, and have continued to be interested and involved in independent diplomacy for that country for many years. I guess you could say I had the uncanny habit of putting myself in the middle of places during their most turbulent times.
I had also studied how data could be used for good, looking at how people empowered by it had used it to seek social justice, in some cases to expose corruption and bad actors. In 2011, I had written my master’s thesis using leaked government data from Wikileaks as my primary source material. The data showed what had happened during the Iraq War, exposing numerous cases of crimes against humanity.
From 2010 onward the “hacktivist” (i.e., activist hacker) Julian Assange, founder of the organization, had declared virtual war on those that had waged literal war on humanity by widely disseminating top secret and classified files that proved damning to the American government and the U.S. military. The data dump, called “The Iraq War Files,” prompted public discourse on protection of civil liberties and international human rights from abuses of power.
Now, as part of my PhD dissertation in diplomacy and human rights, and a continuation of my earlier work, I was going to combine my interest in Big Data with my experience of political turbulence, looking at how data could save lives. I was particularly interested in something called “preventive diplomacy.” The United Nations and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) across the globe were looking for ways to use real-time data to prevent atrocities such as the genocide that occurred in Rwanda in 1994, where earlier action could have been taken if the data had been available to decision makers. “Preventive” data monitoring—of everything from the price of bread to the increased use of racial slurs on Twitter—could give peacekeeping organizations the information they needed to identify, monitor, and peacefully intervene in high-risk societies before conflicts escalated. The proper gathering and analysis of data could prevent human rights violations, war crimes, and even war itself.
Needless to say, I understood the implications of the capabilities Nix was alleging the SCL Group possessed. His talk of data, combined with his words about revolutions, left me unsettled about his intentions and the risks his methods might pose. This made me reluctant to share what I knew about data or what my experience with it was, and I was grateful that day in London to see that he was already wrapping up with Chester’s friends and preparing to leave.
Fortunately, Nix had paid me little attention. When he wasn’t talking about his company, we had chatted in general about my work on campaigns, but I was relieved he hadn’t picked my brain about anything specific to do with Obama’s New Media campaign, any of my work on prevention and exposure of war crimes and criminal justice, or my passion for the use of data in preventive diplomacy. I saw Nix for what he was: someone who used data as a means to an end and who worked, it was clear, for many people in the United States whom I considered my opposition. I seemed to have dodged a bullet.
I thought Chester’s friends wouldn’t choose to work with Nix. His presence and presentation were too large and extravagant, too big for them and for the room. His ebullience had been charming and persuasive; he had even tempered his immodesty with exquisitely honed British manners, but his bluster and ambition were out of proportion with their needs. Nix, though, seemed oblivious to the men’s reserve. As he packed up to leave the restaurant, he prattled on about how he could help them with specially segmented audiences.
When Nix got up from the table, I realized I’d still have time to pitch Chester’s friends. Once Nix was out the door, I intended to approach them now privately, with a simple and modest proposal. But as Nix began to go, Chester gestured to me that I ought to join him in saying a proper good-bye.
Outside in the cold, with the afternoon light waning, Chester and I stood with Nix in a few long seconds of awkward silence. But for as long as I had known him, Chester had never been able to tolerate silence of any length.
“Hey, my Democrat consultant friend, you should hang out with my Republican consultant friend!” he blurted out.
Nix flashed Chester a sudden and strange look, a combination of alarm and annoyance. He clearly didn’t like being caught off guard or told what to do. Still, he reached into his suit coat pocket and pulled out a messy stack of business cards and began shuffling through them. The cards he’d taken out clearly weren’t his. They were of varied sizes and colors, likely from businessmen and potential clients like Chester’s visiting friends, other men to whom he must have pitched his wares on similar Mayfair afternoons.
Finally, when he fished out one of his own cards, he handed it to me with a flourish, waiting while I paused to take it in.
“Alexander James Ashburner Nix,” the card read. From the weight of the paper stock on which it was printed to its serif typeface, it screamed royalty.
“Let me get you drunk and steal your secrets,” Alexander Nix said, and laughed, but I could tell he was only half joking.
2
Crossing Over
OCTOBER–DECEMBER 2014
In the months after I first met Alexander Nix, I still wasn’t able to secure any work that would substantially improve my family’s current financial situation. In October 2014, I reached out again to Chester for help in finding the right kind of part-time job, and he responded by arranging a meeting for me with his prime minister.
It was a rare opportunity for me to offer digital and social media strategy to a nation’s leader. The prime minister was a multiterm incumbent running for reelection, but this time he was facing strong opposition in his country and was concerned about losing. Chester wanted to introduce me to him to see how I might be of help.
This was how, quite inadvertently, I ran into Alexander Nix a second time.
I was in the lounge of a private jet hangar at Gatwick Airport, waiting for a morning meeting with the prime minister, when the door of the lounge flew open and Nix burst in. I was early for my meeting; his was the first one of the day, and of course it had to have been scheduled before mine. My poor luck again.
“What are you doing here?” he asked, his expression both threatening and threatened. He clutched his beaten-up briefcase to his chest and leaned backward in mock horror. “Are you stalking me?”
I laughed.
When I told him what I was doing there, he let me know that he had been working with the prime minister on the past few elections. He was fascinated to hear that I was there “hoping” to do the same thing.
We exchanged some small talk. And when he was called in to his meeting, he tossed an invitation over his shoulder. “You should come to the SCL office sometime and learn more about what we do,” he said, and then he was gone.
Although I was still wary of him, I would indeed choose to visit Alexander Nix at the SCL office. A few days after our chance encounter at Gatwick, Chester called to say that “Alexander” had been in touch, and could the three of us get together and perhaps chat about what we all might be thinking about the prime minister’s upcoming election?
I found myself strangely and pleasantly surprised at the idea. Something about running into me at the hangar must have caught Alexander’s attention. Perhaps he wasn’t used to boldness in someone of my age and gender. Whatever his reason, the proposed meeting was about working together, which struck me as far more positive than working against each other, given that he obviously had the upper hand and especially because I truly needed work.
In mid-October, Chester and I visited the SCL office together. It was tucked away off Green Park, near Shepherd Market, down an alley and off a road called Yarmouth Place, and it occupied a worn-looking building that appeared not to have been rehabbed since the 1960s. The building was filled with offices of unknown small start-ups, such as the drinkable-vitamins company SCL shared a hallway with. Wooden crates filled with tiny bottles nearly blocked our way into the ground-floor conference room, which was shared among all tenants and needed to be rented by the hour—not exactly what I expected of such a seemingly-posh crew of political consultants.
But it was that room where Chester and I met with Alexander and Kieran Ward, whom Alexander introduced to us as his director of communications. Alexander said Kieran had been on the ground for SCL in many foreign elections; he appeared to be only in his mid-thirties, but the expression in his eyes told me they had seen a lot.
There was a great deal at stake in the election of the prime minister, Alexander told us. The PM had “an inflated ego,” he said. Chester nodded in assent. This was the PM’s fifth bid for office, and amid dissatisfaction, his people were calling for him to step down. In his meeting with him at Gatwick, Alexander had warned the PM that if he “didn’t batten down the hatches,” he was certain to lose, but there was little time left. The election was coming up in a few months, after the turn of the New Year.
What SCL was hoping to do, Alexander began, and then he stopped himself. He looked at Chester and me. “But you don’t even know what we do, do you?” and before we knew it, he’d slipped out the door and slipped back in again, laptop in hand. He turned down the lights and pulled up a PowerPoint presentation that he projected onto a big screen on the wall.
“Our children,” he began, clicker in hand, “won’t live in a world with ‘blanket advertising,’” he said, referring to the messaging intended for a broad audience and sent out in a giant, homogenous blast. “Blanket advertising is just too imprecise.”
He pulled up a slide that read, “Traditional Advertising Builds Brands and Provides Social Proof but Doesn’t Change Behavior.” On the left-hand side of the slide was an advertisement for Harrods department store that read 50% OFF SALE in large type. On the right were the McDonald’s and Burger King logos, arches and a crown.
These kinds of ads, he explained, either were simply informational or, if they even worked, merely “proved” an existing customer’s loyalty to a brand. The approach was antiquated.
“The SCL Group offers messaging built for a twenty-first-century world,” Alexander said. Traditional marketing like these ads would never work.
If a client wanted to reach new customers, “What you have to do,” he explained, was not just reach them but “convert” them. “How can McDonald’s get somebody to eat one of their burgers when they’ve never done so before?”
He shrugged and clicked to the next slide.
“The Holy Grail of communications,” he said, “is when you can actually start to change behavior.”
The next slide read, “Behavioral Communications.” On the left was an image of a beach with a square, white sign that read, “Public Beach Ends Here.” On the right was a bright yellow, triangular placard resembling a railroad crossing sign. It read, “Warning. Shark Sighted.”
Which one was more effective? The difference was almost comical.
“Using your knowledge of people’s fear of being eaten by a shark, you know that the second would stop people from swimming in your piece of sea,” Alexander said. Your piece of sea? I thought. I suppose he’s used to pitching to those that have their own.
He continued without pause: SCL wasn’t an ad agency. It was a “behavior change agency,” he explained.
In elections, campaigns lost billions of dollars using messages like the Private Beach sign, messages that didn’t really work.
In the next slide was an embedded video and an image, both campaign ads. The video was composed of a series of stills of Mitt Romney’s face and clips of audiences applauding over a soundtrack of a Romney speech. It concluded with the phrase “Strong New Leadership.” The image was of a parched front lawn littered with signs on which candidates’ names had been printed. Romney, Santorum, Gingrich—it almost didn’t matter who it was. It was so clear how static the signs were, how easy to ignore.
Alexander let out a little chuckle. You see, he said. None of these signs “converts” anyone. He held out his arms. “If you’re a Democrat and you see a Romney yard sign, you don’t suddenly have this ‘Road to Damascus’ moment and change party.”
We laughed.
I sat there amazed. Here I’d been in communications for many years, and I’d never thought to examine the messaging this way. I’d never heard anyone talk about the flatness of contemporary advertising. And until this moment, I had seen the Obama New Media campaign of 2008, for which I’d been a dedicated intern, as so sophisticated and savvy.
That campaign had been the first to use social media to communicate with voters. We’d promoted Senator Obama on Myspace, YouTube, Pinterest, and Flickr. I’d even created the then-senator’s first Facebook page, and I’d always treasured the memory of the day Obama came into the Chicago office, pointed at his profile photo on my computer screen, and exclaimed, “Hey, that’s me!”
Now I saw that, however cutting-edge we’d been at the time, in Alexander’s terms, we had been information-heavy, repetitive, and negligible. We hadn’t converted anyone, really. Most of our audience consisted of self-identified Obama supporters. They’d sent us their contact information or we gathered it from them with their permission once they posted messages on our sites. We hadn’t reached them; they had reached us.
Our ads had been based on “social proof,” Alexander explained; they had merely reinforced preexisting “brand” loyalty. We had posted endlessly on social media Obama content just like the Private Beach sign, the repetitive Romney video, and the lame lawn signs that didn’t cause “behavioral change” but were “information-heavy” and provided mere “social proof” that our audience loved Barack Obama. And once we had Obama lovers’ attention, we sent them even more information-heavy and detailed messaging. Our intention might have been to keep them interested or to make sure they voted, but according to Alexander’s paradigm, we had merely flooded them with data they didn’t need.
“Dear so-and-so,” I remembered writing. “Thank you so much for writing to Senator Obama. Barack’s out on the campaign trail. I’m Brittany, and I’m responding on his behalf. Here are some policy links for you on blah, blah, blah, blah blah.”
As enthusiastic as we had been—and our New Media team was hundreds strong and the campaign occupied two full floors of a skyscraper in downtown Chicago that summer—I saw now that our messaging was simple, perhaps even crude.
Alexander pulled up another slide, one with charts and graphs showing how his company did much more than create effective messaging. It sent that messaging to the right people based on scientific methods. Before campaigns even started, SCL conducted research and employed data scientists who analyzed data and precisely identified the client’s target audiences. The emphasis here, of course, was on the heterogeneity of the audience.
I had been particularly proud that the Obama campaign was known for how it segmented its audience, separating them according to the issues they cared about, the states in which they lived, and whether they were male or female. But seven years had elapsed since then. Alexander’s company now went far beyond traditional demographics.
He pulled up a slide that read, “Audience Targeting Is Changing.” On the left was a picture of the actor Jon Hamm as Don Draper, the 1960s Madison Avenue advertising executive from the AMC series Mad Men.
“Old-school advertising in the 1960s,” Alexander said, “is just loads of smart people like us, sitting around a table like this, coming up with ideas like ‘Coca-Cola Is It’ and ‘Beans Means Heinz’ and spending all our clients’ money pushing that out into the world, hoping that it works.”
But whereas 1960s communication was all “top down,” 2014 advertising was “bottom up.” With all the advances in data science and predictive analytics, we could know so much more about people than we ever imagined, and Alexander’s company looked at people to determine what they needed to hear in order to be influenced in the direction you, the client, wanted them to go.
He clicked over to yet another slide. It read, “Data Analytics, Social Sciences, Behavior and Psychology.”
Cambridge Analytica had grown out of the SCL Group, which itself had evolved from something called the Behavioural Dynamics Institute, or BDI, a consortium of some sixty academic institutions and hundreds of psychologists. Cambridge Analytica now employed in-house psychologists who, instead of pollsters, designed political surveys and used the results to segment people. They used “psychographics” to understand people’s complex personalities and devise ways to trigger their behavior.
Then, through “data modeling,” the team’s data gurus created algorithms that could accurately predict those people’s behavior when they received certain messages that had been carefully crafted precisely for them.
“What message does Brittany need to hear?” Alexander asked me, and clicked over to another slide. We need to create “adverts just for Brittany,” he said, looked at me again, and smiled. “Just for the things she cares about and not for anything else.”
At the end of his presentation, he pulled up an image of Nelson Mandela.
Mandela was in my pantheon of superheroes. I had worked with one of his best friends in South Africa, someone who had been imprisoned with him on Robben Island. I had even helped run a Women’s Day event in South Africa for Mandela’s longtime partner, Winnie, but I’d never gotten the chance to shake the hand of the man himself. Now, here he was, right before me.
Alexander said that in 1994, the work SCL did with Mandela and the African National Congress had stopped election violence at the polls. That had affected the outcome of one of the most important elections in the history of South Africa. On the screen was a ringing endorsement from Mandela himself.
How could I not have been impressed?
Alexander had to jump out of the meeting abruptly—something had come up—but he left us in the capable hands of Kieran Ward, who walked us through more of what SCL did.