O să pun chestia asta aici, în mare parte pentru că o vedem de ani de zile, în fiecare zi și totuși clienții nu o înțeleg. Darămite oamenii de rând care habar n-au unde sunt datele lor, ce fac, cum funcționează internetul și probabil nici nu se întreabă cum ajung paginile de internet la ei, nevermind anything else.
Ne luptăm nu numai cu posturi TV la care oamenii stau cu ochii toată ziua și înghit prostiile pe care le debitează ca apoi să le regurgiteze, ci și cu asta:
„My children will certainly never, ever understand this concept of mass communication.” Up to now, explains Nix, election campaigns have been organized based on demographic concepts. „A really ridiculous idea. The idea that all women should receive the same message because of their gender—or all African Americans because of their race.” What Nix meant is that while other campaigners so far have relied on demographics, Cambridge Analytica was using psychometrics.
„At Cambridge,” he said, „we were able to form a model to predict the personality of every single adult in the United States of America.” The hall is captivated. According to Nix, the success of Cambridge Analytica’s marketing is based on a combination of three elements: behavioral science using the OCEAN Model, Big Data analysis, and ad targeting. Ad targeting is personalized advertising, aligned as accurately as possible to the personality of an individual consumer.
„Pretty much every message was data-driven,” Alexander Nix remembers. On the day of the third presidential debate between Trump and Clinton, Trump’s team tested 175,000 different ad variations for his arguments, in order to find the right versions above all via Facebook. The messages differed for the most part only in microscopic details, in order to target the recipients in the optimal psychological way: different headings, colors, captions, with a photo or video. This fine-tuning reaches all the way down to the smallest groups, Nix explained in an interview with us. „We can address villages or apartment blocks in a targeted way. Even individuals.”