If you understand someone's mentality on the subject you can decide if they see:
1) An ad with someone breaking into a home and the homeowner defending themselves with a firearm (sell insurance?)
2) A grandfather and grandson on a hunting trip (hunting supplies?)
3) Or maybe gun violence hotline with powerful images.
The people seeing these ads are under the assumption that everyone else sees them, not that it's specifically targeted at their personality type. These affect if you think other people understand your issue or not. Thus affecting your motivation and attitude.
If you see an ad that fits your mindset, you think you're on the majority side. This was powerful in classic media, it's just as powerful now.
How long will that be true? Do people make that assumption about search results?
I agree that it's pretty obvious you're being retargeted when ads for camping supplies start showing up three days after you search for them on Amazon. But the practice of "personalization" of results and ads is far larger and deeper, to a degree that most people never seem to think about.
The truth is WAY worse of course, but she immediately knows the ads she saw won’t show for me as well.
Even when I explain how ads can be different, I don't think people really want to believe it, or understand it, and they certainly do not realize the power of these targeting abilities..
According to the article:
"The accuracy he claims suggests it works about as well as established voter-targeting methods based on demographics like race, age, and gender....the digital modeling Cambridge Analytica used was hardly the virtual crystal ball a few have claimed."
It's pretty clear that they were selling snakeoil. In fact, the use of CA wasn't particularly helpful to anyone [1]...hiring them was just a prerequisite for obtaining campaign contributions from the Mercer family, who had put up the money behind CA [2].
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/cambridge-analytica-facebook-...
In Facebook campaigns you can use certain things, such as user's interest, to select who sees your message.
I'm not an expert on Facebook analytics, but I believe you can get pretty good stats on how your campaigns are working, how much promoted posts get shared etc.
This sounds like the holy grail for advertising. You get to write your message for certain profile and get quick feedback how it worked. Even if the system is not perfect, you would have an advantage compared to somebody else who is spending the same amount of money and not using similar targeting.
Maybe their model also allowed them to find social influencers with many followers. Being able to targer these people and get them to share your message would be really good.
The article compares this to the effectiveness of traditional voter targeting methods. I'm not sure what the parameters used on those are, but maybe all of them are not available on FB, justifying the need for something else.
Here is an interesting Ted Talk which discusses an FB experiment that details how effective minor UI changes can be on voter turnout (13:40)
https://www.ted.com/talks/zeynep_tufekci_we_re_building_a_dy...
Qualitatively: show things that get them angry.
Quantitatively: test and control pop splits.
Or don't look at votes, look at candidate likes and shares over time, especially as they shift.
The defined metric doesn't have to be "propensity for this individual to vote for a candidate." It can be "percentage delta over untreated markets compared to prior campaigns."
How do you actually do this? Presidential elections come once every 4 years.
What if all the sensitivities are dependent on the length of the candidates' hair? It seems the total hair length of the two candidates was a maximum at the last election. Another time you might be sampling more towards the middle.
One year they will have been round and had a lengthy discussion with Mrs X, but Mr X slammed the door in their face another time. This was somewhat lower tech: the information was printed out and attached to a clipboard.
Most of the time this information is correct. It's more interesting when it's really incorrect. That said, some of the best sessions I've been involved in were where there was no information.
Demand? That seems like a great way to get arrested or shot for trespassing.
I could imagine this working on Dem voters who are wavering on Hillary with leads like "she thinks the TPP is the gold standard" etc.
But I also wonder what exactly you are going to do with the predictions. What exactly do you show to someone to make them more likely to go and vote if they are inclined to vote your way, or make them stay at home otherwise? Is there evidence that whatever you're showing actually works? Or do you try to change people's minds? What do you do?
Knowing how the state of things -in this case, people's voting inclinations- is not the same as knowing what to do, ie a strategy.
I don't know how effective it is, I'd like to learn more. But I smell the possibility that these CA type firms are simply selling snakeoil to desperate political activists.