Silicon Snake Oil (or how data analytics didn't really win it for anyone)

'Twas ever thus....

Cambridge Analytica is not the first political technology vendor to made big, unproven claims about its abilities. But we live in the age of silicon snake oil. There are millions to be made selling gullible investors and clients on mumbo-jumbo.

And right now it suits the political left - in the USA and the UK - to see that 'silicon snake oil' as some sort of darkly sinister plot to undermine democracy. The truth - despite the ever more scary stuff we see from documentaries like 'The Great Hack' - is that, just as ride-sharing disrupts taxi services and Airbnb hotels, social media disrupts the established norms of political communication, norms that said messages from political campaigns to the public are mediated through TV and newspapers.

As Micah Sifry (from who I've taken the quotation above) reminds us:

When it comes to voters’ decisions about their choice of candidate, most forms of paid political persuasion, including TV ads, online ads, mailers, phone calls, and door-knocking, have no discernible effect in terms of changing people’s minds. That’s the conclusion of a careful meta-review of 49 field experiments all looking at general election campaigns, published by political scientists Joshua Kalla and David Broockman in the American Political Science Review in 2018

We told you so (or rather I was told way back in 1982 before all this Internet malarkey existed) - political campaigning is nearly all about finding people who say they'll support you and getting them to vote. We repeatedly told activists - 'don't waste your time trying to persuade somebody on the doorstep - if they're arguing with you they probably won't be voting for you, get a VI and skedaddle' (or words to that effect). Later on we used profiling and targeting so as to hopefully find more people who say they'll vote for us and spend less time knocking on the doors or ringing the phones of people who won't.

If you're one of those people who think some sort of sinister international cabal is responsible for manipulating thick people into voting for things you don't agree with then you are every bit as thick as those people you consider so stupid they had their minds switched 180 degrees by a Facebook ad. What's happening is that data analytics businesses like Cambridge Analytica - "all hat and no cattle" as one Ted Cruz advisor put it - are trying to exploit the fixed belief that our minds (or rather, other people's minds) are peculiarly persuadable by one particular form of communication, advertising. It's true that advertisers spend a lot of time thinking about what message their consumers want to hear but they also know that, in most markets, the money is best invested in reminding your existing customers what a fantastic choice they made. The same goes for political communications.

There's a quite pervasive idea that political communication should take place in a sort of virtual arena where every voter receives the same information. This, we're told is because targeted communications somehow corrupt democracy by giving Mary a message about animal welfare and Steve a message about hospitals especially if Steve won't see the message Mary gets and vice versa. There's a deal of discussion about 'dog whistles' and hints at sinister subliminal messages. As political parties quickly find out, they are just like consumer brands where sustaining the brand and motivating the consumer is the primary function of communication. What targeting does is to allow the party to talk to Mary about the things that are important to Mary and to connect those interests to the party's programme. But the starting point here is that Mary is more likely than not to vote for that party - if she isn't the communication is mostly wasted.

This is why Cambridge Analytica didn't win anybody anything with its psychological targeting - it's not very effective:

The Cruz campaign stopped using its data. Chris Wilson, the campaign’s director of research, analytics, and digital strategy, discovered that more than half the voters CA had identified as Cruz supporters in Oklahoma actually backed other candidates

So next time you watch a slick TV documentary or read a long 'join-the-dots' screed in The Observer or the New York Times, remember that, for all that CA might be sinister, linked to shadowy dark money, what they sold was the data analytics version of the quack doctor's patent cure all.

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The best 21st century political campaigns will owe more to Saul Alinsky and Readers Digest than Cambridge Analytica

The Cambridge Analytica story has now transmogrified into a good old-fashioned story about how a political campaign some folk didn't like might have broken some rules (I suspect it probably hasn't but, as ever, I'm ready for surprise). The more interesting part of the story, the bit about the use of sophisticated database marketing in politics, has got itself sidelined while the screams of defeated and unreconciled Remain supporters - or in the USA disappointed Clinton enthusiasts and anti-Trump mavens - echo round the halls.

I'm not going to go down the rabbit hole of the latest sensationalised allegations about the referendum campaign with its deliberate conflation of different actions at different times, use of gossip and repetition of allegations already investigated. Mostly because it's not all that important - the UK probably needs to rework its rules on political marketing at elections to reflect modern practices but that's about it really.

Much more important is the question as to whether the ideas, methods and approaches being pushed by the likes of Cambridge Analytica are effective and, if they are, whether we should be concerned about how they will affect the conduct of our public political debate. For a starter, here's Jamie Bartlett from Demos writing in The Spectator:

The shift towards big data elections has profound consequences for the whole of modern politics. If every voter is reduced to a data point who receives not real messages from politicians, but machine–generated adverts finely tuned towards personality and mood, then elections become little more than a software war. And the more politics is a question of smart analysis and nudges rather than argument, the more power shifts away from those with good ideas and toward those with good money or good data skills.

Bartlett has a point but I suspect he is overegging it a bit. The Spectator article describes a pretty standard data-driven direct marketing campaign little different from those we were designing for clients 25 years ago:

Cambridge had a database of around 5,000 data points on 200 million Americans and combined it with the Republican Party’s own voter data to build dozens of these highly focused universes and model how ‘persuadable’ its members were. (For example, analysts discovered during the race that a preference for cars made in the US was a solid indication of a potential Trump voter). Creative types then designed specialised ads for these universes, based on the specific things they were thought to care about. Every-thing was tested, retested, redesigned. They sent out thousands of versions of fund-raising emails or Facebook ads, working out what performed best. They tried donate pages with red buttons, green buttons, yellow buttons. They even tested which unflattering picture of Hillary worked best.

It sounds scary when you set it out like this but the reality is that, although we should absolutely be bothered about data protection and security, these methods really don't make the scale of difference that companies like Cambridge Analytica are wont to claim:

Does it work? Yes – but it’s not a silver bullet. We’d reckon on uplift in response of around 2X or maybe 3X compared to a random selection. Great until you realise that the response to random was around 0.2% - all that clever technology means that, instead of getting ignored by 998 out of 1000 people, you only get ignored by 994.

And those numbers I cited are response figures - people actually responding, doing something we've asked them to do - the reality with message advertising such as that used in political campaigns is that the level of inattention is several orders of magnitude greater (one of the depressing things for advertisers is the realisation that nearly all their carefully constructued 'reach' results merely in people completely ignoring the advertising). This is essentially what political scientists Kalla & Broockman found:

Significant theories of democratic accountability hinge on how political campaigns affect Americans’ candidate choices. We argue that the best estimate of the effects of campaign contact and advertising on Americans’ candidates choices in general elections is zero.

All that noise. All those messages. Billions spent on advertising. And there's no evidence that it makes a blind bit of difference to the outcome (as an ad man I'm not entirely convinced but as a political campaigner it's very unusual for the actual campaign to change much - the 2017 general election is an outlier in this). I note that Bartlett comments that Trump's victory was based on very small margins in three or four key states - not a new phenomenon as fans of hanging chads will remember. But we can't isolate the impact of different campaign elements - TV coverage, advertising and the ground campaign including 'get out the vote' activity.

When we look at the UK, the debate is about the referendum (of course, Vote Leave is very clear that it didn't use Cambridge Analytica or their style of psychometrics-based targeting) where perhaps the communications rules are different. That being said, the outcome was determined largely by unprecedentedly high turnout among older, working class voters - to be blunt, these are those least likely to be influenced by social media activity because they're not using social media (about half of 50-60 year olds and a third of over 65s).

It seems to me that, with the end of the mass media age, political campaigning will change. It also seems to me that very few political marketers have begun to grasp the significance of this change - it's not merely Jamie Bartlett's worry about what might be called the 'agora' but more that social media democratises political debate in a way not liked or expected by the dominant media forms. But first we need to put to bed the idea that algorithmic targeting is the marketing equivalent of a ninth level magic user spell.

Here's Kris-Stella Trump (no relation to The Donald) Program Director of the Anxieties of Democracy program at the Social Science Research Council:

The “Big 5” personality traits (which Cambridge Analytica claimed to use in its work) only predict about 5 percent of the variation in individuals’ political orientations.

...it’s possible to predict personality from online data. But a recent meta-analysis shows that even if you have access to someone’s digital footprint, you can only learn so much about their Big 5 traits. Even if your model does well at first, it will probably be out of date soon, as the things people “like” on Facebook change.

You can improve online advertisements by targeting them using personality data. But the effects tend to be small. In this successful study, researchers targeted ads, based on personality, to more than 1.5 million people; the result was about 100 additional purchases of beauty products than had they advertised without targeting.

Once you know that personality prediction probably didn’t add much value to Cambridge Analytica’s approach, then what it did starts to look a lot like the microtargeting also used by other campaigns, and which the Obama 2008 campaign in particular was famous for.

Dr Trump also makes the killing observation that Cambridge Analytica "does not seem capable of pulling off the large-scale and complex personality-based profiling operation that it claims to have mastered."

So we have a methodology that might add 5% to targeting systems that have been around for nigh on 40 years applied to an environment that works on social interaction, word-of-mouth and endorsement. The result isn't a magic wand but a system that probably won't make a jot of difference to outcomes from social media marketing. Indeed, the successful approaches to social media marketing owe more to Alinsky's theories of community organising than they do to database marketing. This focus on organisation is one reason why Momentum and Corbyn's team have been successful despite the limitations of his political offer.

The manner in which political debate is changing means that the old conduit (or rather the mass media age's conduit) for political messaging is less powerful. It's undoubtedly true that TV coverage probably had more to do with Trump's election than data marketing or social media but it no longer has the field to itself. What we get (and both Trump and Corbyn got this) is a return to the public meeting, the rally and the "impromptu" street event. It's not, as Jamie Bartlett suggests, that political debate and engagement is atomised via the Internet but rather that it will be more like the debate of times before mass media but overlain with a social media element. As a result the skill set for the campaigner will be about organisation and activism rather than slick communications and advertising.

So I guess the advice to would-be political marketers is to step away from the box of tricks that the likes of Cambridge Analytica are flogging and read Rules for Radicals, The Solid Gold Mailbox and David Ogilvy's advice on selling (it's very sexist as it was written in 1935). Then go and do a lot of listening to what people talk about (clue - it's not politics or, at least, obviously politics).

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More on how Big Data didn't win it

Buzzfeed published an article back in February about the 'Big Data' thing and Donald Trump's campaign:

Several people who worked directly with Cambridge Analytica told BuzzFeed News that despite its sales pitch and public statements, it never provided any proof that the technique was effective or that the company had the ability to execute it on a large scale. “Anytime we ever wanted to test anything as far as psychographic was concerned, they would get very hesitant,” said one former campaign staffer. “At no point did they provide us any documentation that it would work.”

Now I suppose that, if you're a conspiracy theorist, this can be dismissed as the campaign people throwing chaff out the back of the plane but it reinforces for me the weaknesses of the Cambridge Analytica claims. The article sets out some of these claims - or at least the ones that the company has broadcast proudly - including the use of 'psychographics'.

We know (because Cambridge Analytical tell us so) that the company has a 'psychographic profile' derived either from, questionably-sourced, Facebook data or else the company's own surveys. For this to be usable it has to be translated into a system that can be applied to the whole population (or at least that population in very small units). It seems that the Cambridge Analytica CEO is saying they have such a system because he claims the company had “profiled the personality of every adult in the United States of America — 220 million people.”

The real question here isn't whether or not such a profile exists (and if it is based solely on Facebook it doesn't since over 40% of Americans aren't using Facebook and a large part of those who are are irregular or infrequent users even before privacy choices are considered) but whether it is in any way either meaningful or effective as a marketing tool. I've a feeling that it is little better than standard geodemographics built on Richard Webber's 'birds of a feather flock together' principle. The observations of people involved in the Trump campaign seem to bear this out - Cambridge Analytica's work perhaps did provide useful targeting insights but didn't then provide any useable means of directly reaching these new targets.

In marketing pitches, two GOP operatives recalled, Nix has claimed his company has access to proprietary information that includes Facebook data. One of the operatives said the data was too old to be helpful and couldn’t be updated. Others said they’d received a similar pitch, but Nix was too vague about the details for them to evaluate what the data really was. None of the campaign staffers BuzzFeed News spoke with said Cambridge Analytica’s proprietary data had played a key role in any decision-making.

There may indeed be some strategic value in extensive data analysis but it is not the salvation. Indeed, there's some suggestion that Hillary Clinton's campaign was even more driven by data analytics than Trump's campaign:

What Ada did, based on all that data, aides said, was run 400,000 simulations a day of what the race against Trump might look like. A report that was spit out would give campaign manager Robby Mook and others a detailed picture of which battleground states were most likely to tip the race in one direction or another — and guide decisions about where to spend time and deploy resources.

The use of analytics by campaigns was hardly unprecedented. But Clinton aides were convinced their work, which was far more sophisticated than anything employed by President Obama or GOP nominee Mitt Romney in 2012, gave them a big strategic advantage over Trump.

And we know what happened here - Clinton targeted either places she was winning easily or places where chaotic information led the campaign to believe it was doing better than it was. There seems to have been a deal more art in the Trump campaign than the conspiracy theorists want, with those involved using data more cautiously than was the case for the Democrats. Just as with the EU referendum, we see people wanting to deny the failings of their own campaign by suggesting the matter was determined by devious, sinister, billionaire-funded legerdemain. This problem continues today and, if anything, is expanding as Russian bots, Macedonian fake news and manipulative 'right wing' media are added to the things blamed for the 'wrong' result.

The same message needs to go to Democrats as I sent to Remain supporters in the UK:

At some point the rump of disappointed remain voters will stop trying to find some sinister external force - Russians, American data companies, Facebook - that explains why we voted to leave and recognise that, in truth, we voted to leave because the EU is a distant, anonymous, unapproachable, corrupt and interfering undemocratic institution. That's it - all of it. And if you ask people a slightly different question, they'll tell you that London is also a distant, anonymous, unapproachable, corrupt and interfering undemocratic place too. One run by and for people with more connection to New York or Paris than Barnsley or Stoke. Perhaps those still angst-ridden by us leaving can begin to learn this?

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