For the first time, an internal document from Cambridge Analytica reveals how they say they helped Donald Trump win the presidency by using platforms like Google, Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook, and You Tube.
This 27-page presentation was created by the Cambridge Analytica team who worked most closely on Trump’s 2016 campaign.
A former employee told the Guardian that it explains how the campaign micro-targeted American voters with highly customized messages about Trump across various digital channels.
Brittany Kaiser, former Cambridge Analytica director: ‘I voted for Bernie’ – video
They used detailed surveys, data modeling, and algorithms to optimize performance and target around 10,000 different ads to specific groups in the months before the election. The presentation says these ads were seen billions of times.
The document was shown to Cambridge Analytica staff in London, New York, and Washington DC just weeks after Trump won, giving a look inside how this controversial company claimed to pull off one of the biggest political surprises in recent memory.
“This is the debrief of the data-driven digital campaign that was employed for Mr Trump,” said Brittany Kaiser, 30, who was business development director at Cambridge Analytica until two weeks ago when she left due to a contract dispute.
She’s now the second ex-worker in less than a week to speak exclusively with the Guardian about what went on inside the firm – including its work on Britain’s EU referendum.
Kaiser said she had access to this exact document and used it to show potential clients how their secretive methods worked.
Explainer on Cambridge Analytica files
“There was big demand inside for people to see how we did it,” Kaiser said about 2016. “Everyone wanted to know: past clients and future ones. The whole world wanted a look. This is what we could confidentially show if you signed an NDA.”
Kaiser says she cares about human rights but some might argue her time at Cambridge Analytica tells a different story. She spent a lot of time pitching clients in places with histories of exploitation by Western political mercenaries – countries like Lithuania, Benin, Ethiopia and Libya.
Cambridge Analytica has a reputation among political insiders for sometimes overstating its impact. A senior person from Trump’s campaign who saw this document about a year ago said it gave itself credit for work actually done by the Republican National Committee and Brad Parscale, Trump’s digital director.
Kaiser wasn’t part of the campaign but learned about its inner workings through talks with senior staffers – including Alexander Nix, now suspended as CEO.
None of what’s described in this doc breaks any laws. But with all that scandal over Cambridge Analytica grabbing data from over 50 million Facebook users recently coming out, people are starting to see just how closely this industry tracks US voters’ online activity and daily lives.
Even though these data-driven tactics were advanced by then there were still things missing when CA joined Trump’s campaign back in early June 2016 according to this presentation.
At that point – even though he’d locked down enough delegates – Trump had “no speakable data infrastructure” or any “unifying data, digital and tech strategy,” it says plainly.
A sample of Cambridge Analytica’s ‘Trump for President’ debrief. Photograph: Cambridge Analytica Photograph: Cambridge Analytica
Kaiser shared that CA staff told her they were shocked when they got into Trump’s HQ at Trump Tower in New York.
“There wasn’t one main database. Lots of separate sources weren’t linked or cleaned up,” she explained about organizing huge sets of data properly. “No real data science program existed so no modeling happened yet either. And there wasn’t even a digital marketing team.”
One thing CA did early on was start working with data from the party’s official data trust plus other info they gathered through something called Project Alamo.
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Photograph: Cambridge Analytical
Photograph: Cambridge Analytical
Photograph : Cambridges Analytical
Several images showing cambridge analytical advertisements used during trump’s presidential campaigns.
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