What about the other 100 elections in the other 30 countries that were claimed to be won by SCL Elections, CA's parent company?
edit - and what do you think of CA's effect on Brexit? Am in the UK, so have been thinking about CA in light of that, more than any involvement they had with Trump.
https://order-order.com/2018/11/06/information-commissioner-...
(My source could be criticised as biased, but click through to to the actual report by the Information Commissioner's Office if you are suspicious.)
No, just the early statements from Cambridge Analytica and Leave.EU.
Was rather odd that Cambridge Analytica and Leave.EU both claimed to be working together until it started to look bad - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-cambridge-analyt...
https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/static.assets.commercial....
I am not really sure we were good at anything. The company had no direction coming from upper management, so we weren't really able to become experts at anything. The salespeople used the psychographic nonsense to sell to clients, which everyone internal knew was nonsense, so we were sometimes forced to use nonsense to solve problems. We were also forced to tackle impossible challenges because of salespeople's promises. There was very high turnover.
The technical teams were nice and had a lot of smart people. Most were fresh out of uni; first job.
> except the marketing part
I don't think we were particularly good at marketing, unless you mean marketing ourselves as evil geniuses. In which case we were too good for our own good.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/nov/10/labour-part...
https://libertystratcom.org/2018/04/30/brexit-breach-labour-...
Who exactly in the Labour party thought it was a good idea to pinch an election strategy firm from UKIP, that chooses to trade under the name EDL, is beyond me.
For the advertising, concur there's a lot of disagreement over whether or not CA's models worked.
For the data though, having a dataset on population preferences and network connections is useful for things besides just advertising. For example, most people agree the Russian campaign was based on dividing the population on divisive issues; the data exfiltrated from Facebook should reveal any particular group's divisive issues.
TLDR; There's other uses for the data besides targeted ads in the broader topic of data privacy.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/feb/17/obama-digital-...
Barack Obama's re-election team are building a vast digital data operation that for the first time combines a unified database on millions of Americans with the power of Facebook to target individual voters to a degree never achieved before.
Digital analysts predict this will be the first election cycle in which Facebook could become a dominant political force. The social media giant has grown exponentially since the last presidential election, rendering it for the first time a major campaigning tool that has the potential to transform friendship into a political weapon.
Historically, political campaigns haven't designed their paid digital strategies around the iterative, test-driven tactics seen in other industries. The answer why is complicated but Parscale, as far as I can tell, was able to avoid all this organizational cruft because the campaign was so haphazardly put together. Happy to share more if this interesting to you, my startup is in this space.