https://motherboard.vice.com/read/big-data-cambridge-analyti...

I can't tell how much of this is just a dramatic telling the best practices of marketing today seen through the lens of survivorship bias, or how much of what they're done is truly novel and interesting work, at least in the field of politics.

- They ran tens of thousands of creatives and iterated quickly to find what was working, further sub segmenting audiences (using custom audiences) based on response.

- They used different formats early but found video was most effective so were using that primarily by the end (90+%)

- They were primarily fundraising on Facebook, which means rallying the base instead of trying to win over marginal voters. That was an effective strategy that lead to very low CPMs and makes iterating to find market fiit for your message much easier. The rumor is that they turned tens of millions spent on FB into hundreds of millions for the campaign, which they spent elsewhere.

I've heard separately that their entire electoral strategy was to rally the base rather than send a broadly appealing message. Few marketers are interested in doing that so it stands to reason they would have unusual results.

Net net, my guess is that CA did have to do some interesting work to quickly take results from campaigns and spin them into the next, and the campaign had to do some interesting work to generate so much creative, but I'm skeptical that Cambridge Analytica has any data or expertise that couldn't be replicated readily by someone else. I'm suspect we will find that the majority of the advantage was using our platform to the fullest.