Personality-based behavioral targeting moved from elections to commercial sales after 2016.

Evidence

Among this new cohort of mercenaries was Cambridge Analytica, the UK consulting firm owned by the reclusive billionaire and Donald Trump backer Robert Mercer. The firm’s CEO, Alexander Nix, boasted of its application of personality-based “micro-behavioral targeting” in support of the “Leave” and the Trump campaigns during the ramp-up to the 2016 Brexit vote and the US presidential election. Nix claimed to have data resolved “to an individual level where we have somewhere close to four or five thousand data points on every adult in the United States.” While scholars and journalists tried to determine the truth of these assertions and the role that these techniques might have played in both 2016 election upsets, the firm’s new chief revenue officer quietly announced the firm’s less glamorous but more lucrative postelection strategy: “After this election, it’ll be full-tilt into the commercial business.” Writing in a magazine for car dealers just after the US election, he tells them that his new analytic methods reveal “how a customer wants to be sold to, what their personality type is, and which methods of persuasion are most effective.… What it does is change people’s behavior through carefully crafted messaging that resonates with them.… It only takes small improvements in conversion rates for a dealership to see a dramatic shift in revenue.” — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 865

Categorization

• SEED: The pivot of political persuasion-tech into car-dealer marketing is an angle on how surveillance-capitalist methods normalize and profit across domains.
• SHARE: The chief revenue officer writing car-dealer copy that ‘changes people’s behavior through crafted messaging’ is a chilling, specific detail worth sharing with anyone tracking the Cambridge Analytica aftermath.
• XREF: connects to: Corporate and defense funding followed academic personality-prediction research. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 857; Behavioral data shifted from improving service to reading users’ minds for ad targeting. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 244; Behavioral ad targeting was sold as a clairvoyant valet ideally suited to customer needs — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 1080 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Behavioral data shifted from improving service to reading users’ minds for ad targeting. #expands (0.78) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 244
• Behavioral ad targeting was sold as a clairvoyant valet ideally suited to customer needs #expands (0.75) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 1080
• The 2012 Obama campaign applied behavioral surplus prediction directly to voter targeting #expands (0.72) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 395