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cm2012

I'm sure people claim you can find the best voters using their special astrology method also. The FB algorithm already takes in 1000s of black box factors that are going to work better than some unproven personality score hogwash.

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Having worked in that industry, that's backwards. OCEAN is solid, well-understood science; we have decades of figures for test-retest reliability, we know what correlates and what doesn't. FB's black box factors are not public, not understood, and if they stopped working tomorrow no-one would be able to tell you why (or why they worked in the first place).

It takes surprisingly few data points to draw small and detailed psychographic categories of people. This has been known in the advertising world since the 50s, we just didn't have the tools to make microtargeting practical at scale until recently.

We can and do draw detailed psychographic categories with a few data points, but it's far from clear whether the results (and especially the details) are actually correct.

I think "since the 50s" should be taken as evidence against these models. Myers-Briggs first came into vogue in the late 1950s, and has been used for career counseling and hiring since despite being utterly unfit for purpose. Priming work dates to the 70s, and now it appears that many of the long-term uses advertising relies on don't replicate. The 'decoy effect' that drives many product strategies was formalized in the 1980s, and recent work suggests it exists only under very narrow conditions. Modern industry leaders like the Food and Brand Lab have apparently spent the last 20 years publishing absolute nonsense. Even results 'validated' with A/B testing are in many cases just noise from misusing statistics.

Precisely because we didn't have microtargeting or consumer-level feedback, all we've had since the 1950s is the belief that we can build and use these models. We know ads basically work, they improve brand recognition and reputation, but the Don Draper psychological rationales are essentially just-so stories written in the absence of data.

(As far as CA, no one seems to have dug up any seriously unusual patterns in 2016 voting. So unless they paired high-impact psychological targeting with an elaborate statistical coverup, what they actually did with the data wasn't exceptional.)

> This has been known in the advertising world since the 50s

Any reference from the 50s?

Also, anyone care to recommend modern references that go into these topics? (David Ogilvy comes to mind but that's from the 60s).

Psychographic segmentation is an evolution of psychoanalysis; in particular Jaques Lacan, whose work in the 50s took the general ideas of Freudian psychoanalysis and applied them to larger phenomenon -- namely how language and symbolism can be used to pluck emotional strings and influence the minds of groups of like-minded people. An ad man in the 1950s would certainly have been aware of his work. The folks from CA have gone on record about the influence of Lacan, so it's not remotely a stretch.

Edit: For a reference, https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/75bb/e8a5de1fef2b9da44ca1ed... (dense as heck, but imagine you're an ad man from the 50s when reading it)

this is a little dense, but the preface has a nice statement on neurobiology, and wikipedia has some interesting articles on neuroscience and cognitive psychology. I suppose I'm looking for a popsci book on how computer science, psychology, neuroscience, etc all came together in the last decade to become so effective in hacking our brains and influencing our decisions. Or perhaps it's been there all along just now it's getting more attention.

> Or perhaps it's been there all along just now it's getting more attention.

It's been a slow build to add layers of targeting on as the media machine grows. It started out with time-based targeting by showing ads for home goods during the daytime (e.g. soap operas were used to sell soap to housewives). Cable TV was a big step forward -- you could craft shows that appealed to narrower demographics like 8-14 year old boys and then sell ads targeting those demographics.

Psychographic segmentation became prevalent along with cable TV and direct mail, but it was limited to a few dozen "personas" until Google came along and allowed keyword targeting, which then gave way to social targeting. It got exponentially more effective with each step, which is why it seemed to come out of nowhere.

The Facebook algorithm optimizes for Facebook's preferences, not yours as an advertiser. If your goal is to scare people then click-through is no longer your KPI, for example. I think you shouldn't be so quick to dismiss the huge potential potential advantage, particularly when it comes to fear-based political advertising, of backing out psychological profiles of people to refine targeting.

> And the FB algorithm already takes in 1000s of black box factors that are going to work better than some unproven personality score hogwash.

1. My understanding is that CA wasn't just executing FB ads. Is your assumption that this was their only technique?

2. Are you aware of the specific techniques CA used?

3. What would be the purpose of CA obtaining the data then?

1) That kind of targeting is even less useful outside of FB. You can upload gmail addresses to Google to target, or use something like LiveRamp to target on display networks, but both options suck compared to FB.

2) Nothing beyond whats publically available.

3) It's not unusual to test different audiences, I've definitely tested all sorts. I'm sure thats how it started for Cambridge. Of course now, tin pot dictatorships hire them all around the world now to be basically a subpar FB agency, so they're happy with the PR.

> 1) That kind of targeting is even less useful outside of FB. You can upload gmail addresses to Google to target, or use something like LiveRamp to target on display networks, but both options suck compared to FB.

Both google and FB are financially incentivized to provide as much granularity in targeting as possible so they can charge more money to advertisers, who'll get a better return and get promoted. All up until the point that it becomes a liability. Thats the line they're walking - you can totally target quite a few things that end up correlating to say, neurotic people, if you know your audience is neurotic people. You have enough of the dataset at that point.

>who'll get a better return

Or so the story goes. Is it actually true that tighter audience restrictions (targeting) produce better returns?

So are you saying CA wasn't effective at all? Or just as effective as any other agency is/could have been. I'm confused...

CA as an agency might be effective, but this big data scrape is not part of that (beyond marketing themselves as nefarious propagandists to skeezy buyers).

I would say there’s no evidence whatsoever which would tell us whether CA was more or less effective than any other agency might have been.

I also work in this and strongly agree.

Doesn't that "unproven personality score hogwash" have something like 9 decades of research behind it and is considered the gold standard of personality testing by textbooks on the psychology of personality?

Yes, which gives you an idea of what the standards of rigour in the field of psychology are like.

Does it?

Mostly the standards of rigour in the field of psychology are deemed flimsy and a lot of findings have failed to replicate.

It's my understanding that Big Five has been replicated consistently across different languages and cultures over the last 90 years and is one of the only things we're fairly sure of in psychology at this point.

The accusation was that it was "unproven hogwash". That doesn't check out.

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