>As an ad insider I know first hand that the tactics used by Cambridge Analytica and other agencies work, thats why people pay me to do it.

As another ad insider I know first hand that people are willing to pay me to do a ton of things that don't actually work. (They often continue trying to do so after I tell them it doesn't work and it's a bad idea) People and companies pay millions for things that don't work all the time, especially in advertising.

The saying that 'if it didn't work, people wouldn't pay for it' is false, provably false.

After privately doing research and testing for my own clients for years and reading the research of others, I'm not convinced these tactics work at all.

> I know first hand that people are willing to pay me to do a ton of things that don't actually work. (They often continue trying to do so after I tell them it doesn't work and it's a bad idea)

Hehehe very true. I tell people what works then they ask me to do random shit. I can't deny you are right at the end of the day I do what they will pay for whether it works or not.

Evaluating what works by what the dumbest people do is not science. Marketing results are measurable. That people will measure improperly, not at all, or ignore proper measurement approaches is not about what is measured, it's about the people.

Yes, there are things that can't be measured well. Smart operators tend to not do those things, no matter how common or popular they are.

The very old joke "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half" (John Wanamaker, 1838-1922) was always more about advertising companies pushing advertising than about whether results could be measured.

In politics, look at real people on social media sharing false information and commenting about how they agree with it. Politics is the easiest place for advertising to succeed, because you can use mind control techniques more readily (where you need an "other group" to dislike to cement the self-perception being sold).

>Smart operators tend to not do those things, no matter how common or popular they are.

What evidence do you have that political campaigns are "smart operators"? Every experience I've had working with political campaigns has indicated otherwise. The performance of political campaigns is exactly what one would expect if you mixed together a bunch of inexperienced volunteers with snake-oil salesmen and showered them with money.

That joke was made precisely because it's difficult to measure results from advertising. Sure, online banner ads can be precisely measured for click rates, but having spent money on things like billboards, magazine ads, etc. It's difficult to consistently capture the particular ad or place that someone heard about a business. It's difficult to know how many exposures it takes to make an ad effective without going overboard (you can oversaturate, as Bloomberg has proven).

Also, IQ is no defense for persuasion techniques. If you're not keen on the biases influencing your decisions and filters on the world, no amount of intelligence will save you. I think that requires practicing skepticism, both of yourself and of others.

In fact, people with higher IQs are more prone to their own biases. The suspected cause is smarter people come up with more arguments that appear sound to the self, making smart people believe their own b.s. more than an average IQ.

Hello, chain of ancestor posters, each saying the same shocking thing. I have been making things that work, and getting paid for them, for more than 20 years now, and I would like some advice on how to transition my career into making things that do not work, for which the customer has specifically been informed that they will not work, and still get paid for them--preferably paid more than I am currently getting for working things.

Is this just customer management? How do I find stupider, richer customers and convince them to trade the non-working thing they are currently overpaying on, for a non-working thing that I haven't even made yet, and then charge more for it? It seems very alien to my brain that anyone can function in this manner, but it is very important to me that I get some of this money that is apparently controlled by idiots, so that I can do sensible things with it, such as pay for food and housing. I am aware that this is somewhat hypocritical to take a fool's money and spend it wisely, but I promise that if I ever get enough, I will do something incredibly stupid with the excess. Please help.

You need a whole industry of people telling your customers that these things do work.

I think it is quite difficult to accomplish entirely by yourself

It's a customer management thing. We can't change peoples minds we can only get people to act. If the client comes in with an open mind we can help, if they come in with a problem and a solution that isn't working we are kinda fucked, generally they won't accept a solution to the problem, they want their solution to work.

Here is the most common example:

Small business come up with their marketing strategy A and it works they are pretty happy so they invest more into the strategy and get more results, great! They keep doing this and make a small or large fortune doing it, eventually the law of diminishing returns kicks in and they have a problem, they want more results by doing more of A but that isn't working anymore so they come to us and have this conversation.

Client: We have had great results doing A and we want more.

Me: A is working well for you but if you want more results you need to do A and B.

Client: A has worked really well for us so really we want to do more A and get more results.

Me: But doing more of A isn't getting more results, if you want more results you need to do A and B.

Client: Why are you not listening to me? A works really well for us, it gets us good results in the past and we want to do more of it. How much do you charge to do more A?

At the end of the day the client knows for a fact A works and that they are happy with the results and want more.

I don't think it's possible to change some ones mind but I can defiantly target people in the right mindset and then encourage them to act on it.

If the client comes to a marketing agency and wants more A they will do more A, if the client wants more results they will do A and B.

Me: We can do more A for more money!

Client: Fantastic!

a few months later the client will complain they are not getting more results and we will have this same conversation.

Thank you. Most advertising does nothing. I'm sick of people lazily assuming that people that don't vote the way they do must have been manipulated. It is a self-defeating idea in the first place.

By the way the Cambridge analytica data was incredibly similar to something that I used working for a democratic campaign in 2014 midterm elections.

Trump and brexit both won with voters due to the fact that we have for years had policies which benefited the financial and managerial classes over the working classes. These policies created a higher aggregate GDP but did so while concentrating it in the hands of the urban and managerial classes. This is a little bit more complicated than just saying they stole the election by manipulating rednecks. Which is why so many people believe it.

I continue to be astonished by how few people in the community of software engineers understand the countries they live in. If you live in London go to northern England and look around. If you live in San Francisco go inland and take a look at what it looks like when a factory shuts down.

Trump doesn't have the answers to these problems, but he was the first politician on the right to admit they exist. Sanders on the left was routinely squashed by the post Clinton DNC, which traded in supporting unions for the professional and managerial classes.

I get what you're saying, that Brexit was in a sense a protest vote against the current state of things. But if it was purely down to the working class feeling disenfranchised, then it gets very hard to explain why Labour did so dismally in 2015 and still not great in 2017 even whilst promising to respect the EURef outcome and having widespread union support and a raft of policies which would benefit the working class.

I think you can't avoid the fact that narrative plays a huge role, and that facebook played its own part in both informing and disseminating that narrative.

Just out of curiosity what are common things that people try that don't work?

* Buying lists, dumping money in email campaigns to lists

* Losing patience with the development of a sales funnel, dumping money into ads that have no reasonable copy, targeting, offer

* Repeating offers because the development of a sales strategy is hard

* Ignoring blockers to brand development.. such as changing the company name/logo often, ignoring feedback from current customers about things like broken products and poor customer experiences, etc., and instead, dumping money into ad campaigns instead

etc

etc

Reminds me of the old phrase John Wanamaker coined in the late 1800s:

"Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half."

Further, persuasion isn't the only campaign strategy.

Much (more?) effort is put into disinformation, discouragement, confusion.

Brad Parscale, Steve Bannon, and many others have said (bragged) as much.

--

The weaponization of social media has brought two novel strategies.

1- Instigating conflicts. Like organizing both a protest and its counter protest.

2- Virality. Where people themselves help perpetuate the messages.

(Perhaps only novel because of the new found scale.)

Exactly.

Moreover, the second sentence gets it entirely backwards

>The previously little-known company, reporters claimed, had used behavioral influencing techniques to turn out social media users to vote in both elections.

The major Cambridge Analytica push was not to increase turnout of supporters, it was to suppress and divert turnout of the opponent's supporters. E.g., finding black voters and highlighting Hillary's 25-year-ago comment on "superpredators", or pushing Jill Stein & Bernie Sanders as better options, promoting fallacies about the math of 1st-Past-The-Post voting -- all focused on the fence-sitters in key states, just make it feel to them like the real option is the one that helps Trump in 1PPP voting. Note that the success is shown in the margin by which HRC lost in the three states is about 20% of the people voting for Jill Stein, with zero chance to win in 1PPP voting.

Between this massive misdirection in the opening paragraph, and the long but mildly interesting distraction on the 1700s "air loom" hoax, it safe to recognize this article as an attempt to emotionally undermine the CA story and ignore it.

> it was to suppress and divert turnout of the opponent's supporters.

Surely you're aware that political mudslinging ads have been a thing since like, forever, right?

> finding black voters and highlighting Hillary's 25-year-ago comment on "superpredators"

Maybe don't say such crazy things, don't have to worry about someone calling you out on it. I don't recall her campaign ever addressing this issue, I don't recall any sit down where the media pressed her on the issue.

Yes, I'm very well aware that this has been a thing since, like, forever.

A fine example was in the 2000 South Carolina primary when Karl Rove working for Bush, distributed door-to-door flyers just ahead of the primary that implied that John McCain had an illegitimate black baby from an affair. McCain had actually adopted a child from Bangladesh. McCain lost the primary.

Similarly with the HRC issue. It is one thing to have it in the news - or not, quite another to specifically harvest by 280 point tested psychological profiles the people who will be most receptive to changing their behavior by that argument, then silently targeting them in personalized advert campaigns that cannot even be discovered (FB doesn't make public the ads & targeting).

This is about scalability - just like speeding tickets have been a think since, like, forever, but the cops have to be there, or at least post a camera. This is more like if they started handing out tickets via tracking GPS, for every second you exceed the limit.

Same law/situation, scalable technology, entirely different implications.

I've worked as a canvasser, and organized door-to-door campaigns. One of the key CA products was an app for canvassers, telling them about each home on their route. So they knew which homes to ignore, and what message to deliver for the ones worth hitting. And that both saved time, and arguably increased effectiveness.

excellent info - thanks!

> It is one thing to have it in the news - or not

If by "news" you mean gate-keeping establishments owned by very large conglomerates. There's very little local independent news for the average person. There is only politicized news.

It's up to every individual to be their own arbiter of truth and morality. It's my opinion that both major parties in the US lie and deceive, so the things you're referring to have no special merit with me. Remember when Donna Brazile leaked the debate questions to Hillary? Hillary got up on that stage and lied to your faces. Manipulating voters is manipulating voters, the method is immaterial.

The only solution is to let the system buckle under it's own weight. You, as an individual, have to admit to yourself and others that the system is rigged and full of liars, criminals, and cronies regardless of side.

This is a fine example of the mistake of false equivalence, and its consequences.

Of course one can find infractions from anyone. As Cardinal Richelieu famously said: "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."

Getting a debate question in advance is nowhere near the scale of engaging with and changing the country's policy in favor of foreign enemies - yet you use this example to equate it and conclude that we should crash the system.

The result of crashing the system is NOT any kind of improvement. It is anarchy, which is quickly filled in with goverment by warlords -- that is not a situation under which anyone wants to live.

Yes, the system will always have room for improvement, and yes there will always be at least cheating at the edges.

That does not mean that we should make the PErfect the enemy of the Good. We must distinguish between minor cheating and corruption tantamount to treason.

We must remain fully involved -- as Jefferson said, "the price of liberty is eternal vigilance", and build, maintain, and improve the system of checks and balances.

Expecting people to be perfect is a fools errand. The key is to build and maintain a system where the power is distributed - different concentrations of power checked and balanced by others -- so that when people inevitably cheat, the effect is limited, yet the society can still coordinate enough power to accomplish great things.

I'm talking about a society itself run by warlords and rival gangs without institutions, not deliberate twisting of the word to refer to geopolitical actions.

You also apparently deliberately overlook the contrast between the US, which at least makes strong attempts to build and maintain a democracy at home and export those benefits to the world, vs. other world powers like RUS or CCP, which are effectively gangs.

Seriously, consider the consequences of ceding geopolitical hegemony to Putin or CCP, or just having global anarchy. Start with massive increases in pollution as all international cooperation halts and the economies crash and 9 billion people get more desperate.

All this is doing is leading to the looming amplification attributed to social media and hyper-connectivity.

Tipping something over when it is unstable is a decent strategy, but chances increase they'll get something squished at some point in the near future.

Yes, exactly. This is a book review. But also propaganda. Almost a hit piece.

> The major Cambridge Analytica push was not to increase turnout of supporters, it was to suppress and divert turnout of the opponent's supporters.

I didn't want to say it in a post titled tinfoil hats but this, the dark market of political advertising is very real and very dangerous.

Other than the fact you are calling the wrong person an "op" I think this statement says a lot about you:

> the reality is that if advertising didn't work people wouldn't pay for it

People don't pay for advertising. Instead, corporate assholes who do advertising spend money on search for models which make enough to cover the costs of finding ways to get people to repeat the pattern of "re-seeing" or "re-hearing" a brand or message in mind. This is the non-corporate being that does this: the corporation or government.

The public's predisposed nature to keep your marketing crap out of their minds isn't a good excuse to do it, either. Even if it makes money and they allow it without knowing the cost.

> People don't pay for advertising.

Individuals don't pay for advertising, when individuals are group like in a corporation, business, charity, government they become people, I have done advertising for all the above and sole traders.

So the goal is to find the fallacies and Target them.

Very interesting. Thank you.