So, did it then catch all the outliers? The 75-year-old first time voter? The none Facebook user? The contrarian who lies, just a little, here and there? People w/o smart phones and those who rarely review a purchase? Those who decline loyalty cards? Not everyone who voted took that test or has private FB data to correlate with it.
No mention of zer0’s vaunted database ‘that knows more about you than you do about yourself’. No mention of Hillary’s AI, Ada, whose predictions her campaign refused to accept.
I don’t dispute the effectiveness of psychometrics, but the most important bit of data in this article was that Trump adjusts responses on the fly, taking real life reactions into consideration. That made a difference. That is how he thinks and why he is perceived as authentic and, I believe it’s why he won.
I don’t believe anyone had to remind Haitians of what happened in Haiti vis-a-vis the Clintons. The Clintons’ own actions *suppressed* the Haitian vote, just like Cruz and the other R candidates suppressed their own votes all on their own.
We took no surveys, refused all poll calls, reveal very little private data or as little as we can get away with (we all leave breadcrumbs)are social media avoiders and have many contrairian traits. I doubt either of us were even on anyone’s radar. We got no R mailers and a few local/State donk ones. We were Trumpers by August or September. We mostly kept it to ourselves outside of a few close friends and FR. How many of us are there?
What of people such as myself, who understand the datamining and ad targeting game having been in the direct marketing industry, and sort of take a perverse pleasure in seeing just how flimsy the algorithms for online marketing actually are? I honestly can’t say whether I’d love or hate to see my “profile” online. If you’re brave, easily amused or both, try it sometime. Go do some weird web searches, visit some weird websites, allow cookies and leave them in place. Then watch the ads that are dropped in on every website as a result. It’s very amusing. They don’t “know” as much as they think they know. The most irritating thing to me is the apparent scanning of emails on Gmail for keywords, because I’ve had ads targeted that could only be as a result of a presumably private email exchange.
Those without a significant digital footprint can be captured. Based on what data there is and traditional census and household socio-economic data a personality type can be constructed.
Data miners know exactly how much digital usage by neighborhood, and by family if needed, occurs.
The goal of every campaign is to spend the least amount of resources, in an area, to get just the right amount of result.
In battleground states, this is a tool that can carry the day, and it did for Trump.
It doesn't replace the candidate, personal appearances, local face to face networking, party structure, etc. but in a close race it can make the difference.
Think of it as personal political contact software version 2.0. The Hildabeast was using version 1.0 and paid the price.