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> When it comes to voters’ decisions about their choice of candidate, most forms of paid political persuasion, including TV ads, online ads, mailers, phone call

by imiric 7y ago

> When it comes to voters’ decisions about their choice of candidate, most forms of paid political persuasion, including TV ads, online ads, mailers, phone calls, and door knocking, have no discernible effect in terms of changing people’s minds. So the billions spent on campaign advertising essentially has no effect? I don't buy that for a second, otherwise it wouldn't be a billion dollar industry. We know that advertising has a psychological effect on people, and advertisers know how to exploit this in susceptible individuals to sell their product. We also know that the winning margin of the 2016 election was only 79,316 votes[1]. So Cambridge Analytica didn't need to influence millions of people to succeed, as long as they managed to sway some who were already on the fence to not vote for Clinton. This article attempts to discredit the documentary by focusing on whether CA succeeded or not, when the real issue is private data collection, user profiling and tracking, and the usual evils of advertising, which they conveniently choose to ignore. [1]: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/12/hillary-clinton-margin-loss-votes https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/12/hillary-clinton-marg...

tptacek 7y ago
Politics is full of lucrative side-hustles that are demonstrably ineffective. Talk to any insurgent Congressional campaign about consultants to see how bad it is. I have no trouble believing that people are making tens of millions of dollars selling snake-oil "data" products. Markets in general are also chock full of unproductive Red Queens Races; you don't have to constrain yourself to politics to see how organizations can spend billions of dollars only to leave themselves in exactly the place they started. Look for instance at public outreach marketing expenses, writ large. Lots of these things turn out to be self-justifying; people spend money on them because money is generally spent on them. You can also just read the meta-analysis study this piece cites, "Minimal Persuasive Effect Of Campaign Contact In General Elections".
ninth_ant 7y ago
> when the real issue is private data collection, user profiling and tracking, and the usual evils of advertising, which they conveniently choose to ignore. To many, the “real issue” is losing the election. This is what the piece focuses on, and why it draws the conclusion that focusing on blaming CA for losing the election is not helpful for the purpose of trying to win future elections.
BukhariH 7y ago
> So the billions spent on campaign advertising essentially has no effect? I don't buy that for a second, otherwise it wouldn't be a billion dollar industry. So, it's not just about flipping voters. It's also about encouraging people who agree your politics to head to the polls & discouraging the dissenters. I didn't find their use of the data for marketing particularly novel but using that to create a campaign to discourage black youth in Trinidad from voting seems extremely unethical to me.
bart_spoon 7y ago
Honestly, I believe it to an extent. I have done lots of work analyzing marketing campaigns in a data scientist role, and generally I've found that they are pretty ineffective, or at the very least, much less effective than is being purported by many data vendors, digital advertisers, and analytics firms. Big data, AI, and analytics are the buzzwords of the day, and my guess is that at least 60% of the dollars companies are using on their analytics is going to marketing. No one wants to be the dinosaur stuck in the past, and everyone wants to be "data driven". On the other hand, some of the biggest companies in the world (Google, Facebook, Twitter) are in the ad business, which creates a bit of an "appeal to authority" fallacy to the mix. Meanwhile, in my experience, statistical understanding and the general skills required to understand why an analysis would or would not be valid is virtually non-existent for most people. Also, the majority of parties involved have a vested interest in the story of the effectiveness of marketing being perpetuated. Data vendors and advertisers, including giants like Google and Facebook, no longer have a product if it isn't. Consulting companies and internal analytics teams do ton of work solely focused on marketing. That all goes away if people realize its a useless exercise. The companies buying the advertising, who one would think would absolutely be interested in knowing if their dollars are going to waste, are filled with people whose jobs are contingent on the idea that marketing is driving business. I'm not convinced marketing does nothing. But I think the effect is greatly overstated. And I think its becoming less effective over time. I can't remember the last time I clicked on an advertised result on Google, or a banner ad. Perhaps they were useful at one point years ago, but I think people are increasingly learning to tune them out over time, the same way one would acclimate to a noisy environment. Coincidentally, I remember seeing a link here on HN relatively recently about how the New York Times completely dropped their targeted marketing efforts, and found that their subscription growth remained unchanged. I think that were more companies to follow suit, many would see similar results.
- epiphanitus 7y ago
  Thank you for that. That was really interesting. Have you seen any data on conversion rates for native podcast ads? They may not be targeted but given the amount of money being thrown at podcasters these days I wonder if there's a particularly strong advertising rationale for supporting them.
aylmao 7y ago
> We also know that the winning margin of the 2016 election was only 79,316 votes[1]. The smaller the number, the less clearly one can point at a single cause though, right? I mean, to an extreme, say it had been a 1 vote difference. There's millions of factors that can make a vote happen or not (that one voter could've slept in because their alarm broke, that one voter could've gotten sick that day, etc). One vote is an extreme case, but for 80k I can think of a lot of factors that would normally be "small" but suddenly play a sizable amount of importance. - That's 80k Democrats who didn't go to vote. - That's well within the territory of gerrymandering. - That's a tiny fraction of the African American population, where Hillary was notoriously weak. - That's well within the viewership of many Fox News shows and segments. - As the article stated, you could fit these people in a mid-sized football stadium. That's within the territory of having a weak last month of campaign touring, or aggressively getting more rallies done. Just to mention a few. And yes, also means it COULD have been CA— perhaps they weren't as influential as they claimed but 80k is not a large number, they perhaps could've influenced that many people. I'm just wondering if there's a lot of attention being put on this factor, vs other factors that at this scale could've feasibly swayed in the election.
- rjvir 7y ago
  Many factors can influence an outcome. But it's reasonable to focus on the illegal (or just shady) ones. For instance, if a team loses a sporting event by 1 point, and their Gatorade was poisoned, it would be understandable to call out the Gatorade poisoning. Of course, many other things could have swung the outcome as well (random variance, wind, poor effort, etc).
  - aylmao 7y ago
    > Many factors can influence an outcome. But it's reasonable to focus on the illegal (or just shady) ones. I disagree, let me illustrate with examples. The electoral college is a very legal and established process, but it has costed the US two out of the three latest presidential elections (not counting reelections), where the popular vote hasn't matched the result. As a foreigner it's crazy to think the fate of the country is essentially dependent on some random states. This also applies to other problems. Climate change— there's scandals like the Volkswagen emissions fiasco, but legal pollution far outweighs any other type of pollution. Drugs— cocaine and heroin are probably a big problem, but cigarettes and opioids cause more net deaths. Etc, etc. Sketchy issues will make flashier headlines, anger people more, and in general be more straightforward to digest as a problem. It is often the institutionalized factors that have broader impact although unfortunately they will also escape the public eye, precisely because everyone is just "used" to them. Back to this— if the electoral college didn't exist, the US wouldn't even be having this conversation! Trump did lose the popular vote! All of his tactics, misinformation, fear-mongering, etc. did not work in convincing most people in the US that he was a good option for president. He failed. Yet, it's crazy that that doesn't matter, and he could get the presidency even if he lost. Isn't it crazy that that hasn't yet been brought up? That we are here, trying to figure out if this micro-targeting could be to blame for influencing 80k people in 3 random states because these crazy rules say these people's vote matters disproportionally more than the majority vote in the country, instead of talking about the fact these are even the rules in the first place?

by imiric 7y ago

tptacek 7y ago

Politics is full of lucrative side-hustles that are demonstrably ineffective. Talk to any insurgent Congressional campaign about consultants to see how bad it is. I have no trouble believing that people are making tens of millions of dollars selling snake-oil "data" products. Markets in general are also chock full of unproductive Red Queens Races; you don't have to constrain yourself to politics to see how organizations can spend billions of dollars only to leave themselves in exactly the place they started. Look for instance at public outreach marketing expenses, writ large. Lots of these things turn out to be self-justifying; people spend money on them because money is generally spent on them. You can also just read the meta-analysis study this piece cites, "Minimal Persuasive Effect Of Campaign Contact In General Elections".

ninth_ant 7y ago

> when the real issue is private data collection, user profiling and tracking, and the usual evils of advertising, which they conveniently choose to ignore. To many, the “real issue” is losing the election. This is what the piece focuses on, and why it draws the conclusion that focusing on blaming CA for losing the election is not helpful for the purpose of trying to win future elections.

BukhariH 7y ago

> So the billions spent on campaign advertising essentially has no effect? I don't buy that for a second, otherwise it wouldn't be a billion dollar industry. So, it's not just about flipping voters. It's also about encouraging people who agree your politics to head to the polls & discouraging the dissenters. I didn't find their use of the data for marketing particularly novel but using that to create a campaign to discourage black youth in Trinidad from voting seems extremely unethical to me.

bart_spoon 7y ago

Honestly, I believe it to an extent. I have done lots of work analyzing marketing campaigns in a data scientist role, and generally I've found that they are pretty ineffective, or at the very least, much less effective than is being purported by many data vendors, digital advertisers, and analytics firms. Big data, AI, and analytics are the buzzwords of the day, and my guess is that at least 60% of the dollars companies are using on their analytics is going to marketing. No one wants to be the dinosaur stuck in the past, and everyone wants to be "data driven". On the other hand, some of the biggest companies in the world (Google, Facebook, Twitter) are in the ad business, which creates a bit of an "appeal to authority" fallacy to the mix. Meanwhile, in my experience, statistical understanding and the general skills required to understand why an analysis would or would not be valid is virtually non-existent for most people. Also, the majority of parties involved have a vested interest in the story of the effectiveness of marketing being perpetuated. Data vendors and advertisers, including giants like Google and Facebook, no longer have a product if it isn't. Consulting companies and internal analytics teams do ton of work solely focused on marketing. That all goes away if people realize its a useless exercise. The companies buying the advertising, who one would think would absolutely be interested in knowing if their dollars are going to waste, are filled with people whose jobs are contingent on the idea that marketing is driving business. I'm not convinced marketing does nothing. But I think the effect is greatly overstated. And I think its becoming less effective over time. I can't remember the last time I clicked on an advertised result on Google, or a banner ad. Perhaps they were useful at one point years ago, but I think people are increasingly learning to tune them out over time, the same way one would acclimate to a noisy environment. Coincidentally, I remember seeing a link here on HN relatively recently about how the New York Times completely dropped their targeted marketing efforts, and found that their subscription growth remained unchanged. I think that were more companies to follow suit, many would see similar results.

epiphanitus 7y ago
Thank you for that. That was really interesting. Have you seen any data on conversion rates for native podcast ads? They may not be targeted but given the amount of money being thrown at podcasters these days I wonder if there's a particularly strong advertising rationale for supporting them.

aylmao 7y ago

> We also know that the winning margin of the 2016 election was only 79,316 votes[1]. The smaller the number, the less clearly one can point at a single cause though, right? I mean, to an extreme, say it had been a 1 vote difference. There's millions of factors that can make a vote happen or not (that one voter could've slept in because their alarm broke, that one voter could've gotten sick that day, etc). One vote is an extreme case, but for 80k I can think of a lot of factors that would normally be "small" but suddenly play a sizable amount of importance. - That's 80k Democrats who didn't go to vote. - That's well within the territory of gerrymandering. - That's a tiny fraction of the African American population, where Hillary was notoriously weak. - That's well within the viewership of many Fox News shows and segments. - As the article stated, you could fit these people in a mid-sized football stadium. That's within the territory of having a weak last month of campaign touring, or aggressively getting more rallies done. Just to mention a few. And yes, also means it COULD have been CA— perhaps they weren't as influential as they claimed but 80k is not a large number, they perhaps could've influenced that many people. I'm just wondering if there's a lot of attention being put on this factor, vs other factors that at this scale could've feasibly swayed in the election.

rjvir 7y ago
Many factors can influence an outcome. But it's reasonable to focus on the illegal (or just shady) ones. For instance, if a team loses a sporting event by 1 point, and their Gatorade was poisoned, it would be understandable to call out the Gatorade poisoning. Of course, many other things could have swung the outcome as well (random variance, wind, poor effort, etc).
- aylmao 7y ago
  > Many factors can influence an outcome. But it's reasonable to focus on the illegal (or just shady) ones. I disagree, let me illustrate with examples. The electoral college is a very legal and established process, but it has costed the US two out of the three latest presidential elections (not counting reelections), where the popular vote hasn't matched the result. As a foreigner it's crazy to think the fate of the country is essentially dependent on some random states. This also applies to other problems. Climate change— there's scandals like the Volkswagen emissions fiasco, but legal pollution far outweighs any other type of pollution. Drugs— cocaine and heroin are probably a big problem, but cigarettes and opioids cause more net deaths. Etc, etc. Sketchy issues will make flashier headlines, anger people more, and in general be more straightforward to digest as a problem. It is often the institutionalized factors that have broader impact although unfortunately they will also escape the public eye, precisely because everyone is just "used" to them. Back to this— if the electoral college didn't exist, the US wouldn't even be having this conversation! Trump did lose the popular vote! All of his tactics, misinformation, fear-mongering, etc. did not work in convincing most people in the US that he was a good option for president. He failed. Yet, it's crazy that that doesn't matter, and he could get the presidency even if he lost. Isn't it crazy that that hasn't yet been brought up? That we are here, trying to figure out if this micro-targeting could be to blame for influencing 80k people in 3 random states because these crazy rules say these people's vote matters disproportionally more than the majority vote in the country, instead of talking about the fact these are even the rules in the first place?