Targeted. Brittany Kaiser

a railroad crossing sign. It read, “Warning. Shark Sighted.”

      Which one was more effective? The difference was almost comical.

      “Using your knowledge of people’s fear of being eaten by a shark, you know that the second would stop people from swimming in your piece of sea,” Alexander said. Your piece of sea? I thought. I suppose he’s used to pitching to those that have their own.

      He continued without pause: SCL wasn’t an ad agency. It was a “behavior change agency,” he explained.

      In elections, campaigns lost billions of dollars using messages like the Private Beach sign, messages that didn’t really work.

      In the next slide was an embedded video and an image, both campaign ads. The video was composed of a series of stills of Mitt Romney’s face and clips of audiences applauding over a soundtrack of a Romney speech. It concluded with the phrase “Strong New Leadership.” The image was of a parched front lawn littered with signs on which candidates’ names had been printed. Romney, Santorum, Gingrich—it almost didn’t matter who it was. It was so clear how static the signs were, how easy to ignore.

      Alexander let out a little chuckle. You see, he said. None of these signs “converts” anyone. He held out his arms. “If you’re a Democrat and you see a Romney yard sign, you don’t suddenly have this ‘Road to Damascus’ moment and change party.”

      We laughed.

      I sat there amazed. Here I’d been in communications for many years, and I’d never thought to examine the messaging this way. I’d never heard anyone talk about the flatness of contemporary advertising. And until this moment, I had seen the Obama New Media campaign of 2008, for which I’d been a dedicated intern, as so sophisticated and savvy.

      That campaign had been the first to use social media to communicate with voters. We’d promoted Senator Obama on Myspace, YouTube, Pinterest, and Flickr. I’d even created the then-senator’s first Facebook page, and I’d always treasured the memory of the day Obama came into the Chicago office, pointed at his profile photo on my computer screen, and exclaimed, “Hey, that’s me!”

      Now I saw that, however cutting-edge we’d been at the time, in Alexander’s terms, we had been information-heavy, repetitive, and negligible. We hadn’t converted anyone, really. Most of our audience consisted of self-identified Obama supporters. They’d sent us their contact information or we gathered it from them with their permission once they posted messages on our sites. We hadn’t reached them; they had reached us.

      Our ads had been based on “social proof,” Alexander explained; they had merely reinforced preexisting “brand” loyalty. We had posted endlessly on social media Obama content just like the Private Beach sign, the repetitive Romney video, and the lame lawn signs that didn’t cause “behavioral change” but were “information-heavy” and provided mere “social proof” that our audience loved Barack Obama. And once we had Obama lovers’ attention, we sent them even more information-heavy and detailed messaging. Our intention might have been to keep them interested or to make sure they voted, but according to Alexander’s paradigm, we had merely flooded them with data they didn’t need.

      “Dear so-and-so,” I remembered writing. “Thank you so much for writing to Senator Obama. Barack’s out on the campaign trail. I’m Brittany, and I’m responding on his behalf. Here are some policy links for you on blah, blah, blah, blah blah.”

      As enthusiastic as we had been—and our New Media team was hundreds strong and the campaign occupied two full floors of a skyscraper in downtown Chicago that summer—I saw now that our messaging was simple, perhaps even crude.

      Alexander pulled up another slide, one with charts and graphs showing how his company did much more than create effective messaging. It sent that messaging to the right people based on scientific methods. Before campaigns even started, SCL conducted research and employed data scientists who analyzed data and precisely identified the client’s target audiences. The emphasis here, of course, was on the heterogeneity of the audience.

      I had been particularly proud that the Obama campaign was known for how it segmented its audience, separating them according to the issues they cared about, the states in which they lived, and whether they were male or female. But seven years had elapsed since then. Alexander’s company now went far beyond traditional demographics.

      He pulled up a slide that read, “Audience Targeting Is Changing.” On the left was a picture of the actor Jon Hamm as Don Draper, the 1960s Madison Avenue advertising executive from the AMC series Mad Men.

      “Old-school advertising in the 1960s,” Alexander said, “is just loads of smart people like us, sitting around a table like this, coming up with ideas like ‘Coca-Cola Is It’ and ‘Beans Means Heinz’ and spending all our clients’ money pushing that out into the world, hoping that it works.”

      But whereas 1960s communication was all “top down,” 2014 advertising was “bottom up.” With all the advances in data science and predictive analytics, we could know so much more about people than we ever imagined, and Alexander’s company looked at people to determine what they needed to hear in order to be influenced in the direction you, the client, wanted them to go.

      He clicked over to yet another slide. It read, “Data Analytics, Social Sciences, Behavior and Psychology.”

      Cambridge Analytica had grown out of the SCL Group, which itself had evolved from something called the Behavioural Dynamics Institute, or BDI, a consortium of some sixty academic institutions and hundreds of psychologists. Cambridge Analytica now employed in-house psychologists who, instead of pollsters, designed political surveys and used the results to segment people. They used “psychographics” to understand people’s complex personalities and devise ways to trigger their behavior.

      Then, through “data modeling,” the team’s data gurus created algorithms that could accurately predict those people’s behavior when they received certain messages that had been carefully crafted precisely for them.

      “What message does Brittany need to hear?” Alexander asked me, and clicked over to another slide. We need to create “adverts just for Brittany,” he said, looked at me again, and smiled. “Just for the things she cares about and not for anything else.”

      At the end of his presentation, he pulled up an image of Nelson Mandela.

      Mandela was in my pantheon of superheroes. I had worked with one of his best friends in South Africa, someone who had been imprisoned with him on Robben Island. I had even helped run a Women’s Day event in South Africa for Mandela’s longtime partner, Winnie, but I’d never gotten the chance to shake the hand of the man himself. Now, here he was, right before me.

      Alexander said that in 1994, the work SCL did with Mandela and the African National Congress had stopped election violence at the polls. That had affected the outcome of one of the most important elections in the history of South Africa. On the screen was a ringing endorsement from Mandela himself.

      How could I not have been impressed?

      Alexander had to jump out of the meeting abruptly—something had come up—but he left us in the capable hands of Kieran Ward, who walked us through more of what SCL did.

      It had started out running elections in South Africa, and now it ran nine or ten elections each year in places such as Kenya, Saint Kitts, Santa Lucia, and Trinidad and Tobago. Kieran had been on the ground in some of those countries.

      In 1998, SCL had expanded into the corporate and commercial world, and after September 11, 2001, it had begun to work in defense, with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, NATO, the CIA, the FBI, and the State Department. The company had also sent experts to the Pentagon to train others in its techniques.

      SCL had a social division as well. It provided public health communications, in case studies where he explained they persuaded people in African nations to use condoms and people in India to drink clean water. It had had contracts with UN agencies and with ministries of health worldwide.