Eric Wilson, a GOP digital political operative, said that even if the personal details gleaned from Facebook were more potent than other data, a campaign would still have to figure out how to tailor ads to voters.
“The psychographic data is only as good as the creative you’re able to generate,” he said.
And a Democratic operative who works in the digital realm said claims of Cambridge Analytica’s effectiveness in 2016 are very much overstated.
But Christopher Wylie, who helped found the company and served as its director of research until 2014, argues that its work is subtle enough that it might not be noticed.
“A lot of what information operations is, is about warping people’s perceptions,” Wylie told NBC News. “This is a company that was birthed out of a military contractor. The premise is not necessarily to do standard political messaging where people are aware that I am trying to be convinced of something. It is to change what people think and perceive about what is real.”
Trump’s campaign spent $5.9 million on Cambridge Analytica services; Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign shelled out $5.8 million to the company; and Make America Number 1, a superPAC funded by billionaire Robert Mercer, who backed Cruz in the GOP primary before switching to Trump in the general election, paid the firm about $1.5 million.
Mercer invested heavily in the company. And one of his daughters, Rebekah, sits on the board, which announced Tuesday that it had suspended Nix.
Wylie said that Steve Bannon, a then-Mercer ally who later became the chief executive of Trump’s campaign, was particularly interested in what the company was offering.
“Steve wanted weapons for his culture war,” Wylie told ITN Channel 4. “We offered him a way to accomplish what he wanted to do, which was change the culture of America.”
Cambridge Analytica has rejected Wylie’s assertions, and a spokesman for the firm said he is engaged in “a malicious attempt to hurt the company.”
The Trump campaign and Cambridge Analytica actually had an underwhelming digital operation, said Jessica Baldwin-Phillipi, an associate professor at Fordham University who has studied the digital efforts of political campaigns.
“The idea that they had a robust data campaign is just not true,” she said. “They were doing very best practice stuff on the Facebook side, but they weren’t doing this universally. It wasn’t deep or robust.”
She agreed with the political operatives that there is little evidence to support claims that Cambridge Analytica helped swing the election.
“Time and again, studies have shown us that the most persuasive targeting metrics are not crazy-specific microtargeting data but public-record voting history data and geography,” she said.