2 of 4: Cambridge Analytica and facebook data scandal, explained
3 of 4: how psychographics is used
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Demographics explain basic customer information, like age, location and income.But more valuable to marketing is studying psychographics: " the goals, emotions and values that drive customers’ decisions".
As the amount of data available on everybody from their social media presence has grown, so has the power of psychographic profiling from the thousands of likes, comments, and status updates that people make every year, it is possible to create profiles on them that reveal personality traits to companies and campaigns that the person they’re targeting doesn’t even realize they have themselves. In the 1960s and 1970s companies began advertising using subliminal messaging, with the most famous being K-tel "Husker DU?" commercial, a board game advertised in 1974, which prompted the UK, Canada, Australia, and Europe to ban subliminal adverts.
They essentially knew that it was attempting the emotionally manipulate people to buy their products using fairly basic visual or audio prompts. The use of psychographic data takes this same broad concept and creates the same issues, it is making people act in a certain way without them realizing it. |
ALEXANDER NIX: CEO Cambridge Analytica: the power of big data & Psychographics
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There is a case to argue that the messaging being used to target specific people should be controlled in the same way as TV ads, but the reality of the delivery systems for these kinds of adverts makes it almost impossible at present. Facebook ads, for instance, are known as ‘dark ads’ because they aren’t widely known, often unreported by campaigns, and target only a specific group, making their policing incredibly difficult.
However, the move is a smart and ultimately unsurprising one given the increasingly powerful use of data in political campaigns, so it seems that, regardless of whether it is morally right or wrong, it worked.
It is also a complicated subject, after all, political campaigns have targeted specific voters ever since the party political system was established, so how do you draw the line between smart profiling and psychometric manipulation? How do you define who can and can’t use it, too? Companies have been using this method for years, and to some extent almost every advert that you see online today is somehow tailored to an action you’ve taken, so can you just block political parties from using it? Psychographic profiling is certainly a moral gray area, but the reality is that attempts to police it are going to be even more complex, but as we have seen, somebody needs to start or we could end up in a very dark situation that simply throws more fuel on the fire of public perception around data? |
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