It’s the data, stupid! Or is it?
We have been led to believe that the key to mastering the modern world is to master the data it produces. This is as true for politicians seeking power as it is for companies trying to convert clicks into sales. Data knows no bounds. Everything, everywhere is a latent mass of bytes waiting to be collected, analysed and interpreted in the service of a defined goal. For the romantics reading this, it breaks my heart to tell you this also applies to finding love.
Over the past decade we have seen a new economic and political order emerge that in the words of the Harvard academic, Shoshana Zuboff “claims human experience as the raw data for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction and sales.” That is to say, everything we do can be tracked and interpreted in the service of commercial or political gain. Whether we are mindlessly scrolling through our Instagram feed, or deciding what politician to elect, we are never free of influence.
In fact, with every scroll, click or like we transmit information that provides an insight into who we are. As early as 2012, the research of Michal Kosinski discovered that on the basis of 68 Facebook likes it is possible to “predict a users skin color (with 95 percent accuracy), their sexual orientation (88 percent accuracy), and their affiliation to the Democratic or Republican party (85 percent)”. Still further, “intelligence, religious affiliation, alcohol, cigarette and drug use, and whether someone’s parents are divorced” could be accurately determined.
The conclusion posited by Zuboff’s notion of ‘surveillance capitalism’ is that we live in an age of digital surveillance, powered by omniscient algorithms that have the power to quantify human experience, and the ability to control the way we think, act and feel. The dominance of data in modern markets explains why Big Tech (Alphabet, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft) now represent 17.5% of the S&P 500, and why these companies have been on a $2 Trillion bull run over the past year. Data isn’t just the key to power, we are told, it is also the key to unprecedented profitability.
But is it? Surely there is more to it than that?
$5oom on blue
The reason this question fascinates me is because Mike Bloomberg has just made (and lost) a $500m bet on the unwavering belief that data is power.
Let’s be very clear from the outset, this was not a stupid bet to make for a man who has amassed a $60bn dollar fortune selling the stuff. When Bloomberg threw his hat in the ring at the end of 2019 the moderate wing of the Democrats was nowhere; Biden was fluffing his lines, Mayor Pete looked like a man child speaking at a high school debate, and Senator Kloubacher was failing to get traction despite looking like a great candidate on paper. Which meant the contest needed, in the words of Bloomberg’s $11m Super Bowl advert “a dog in the fight” to take on Bernie and his bros.
So how is it that a data driven election campaign, bankrolled by a politically experienced billionaire fell flat before it even got going? Could it be that data isn’t the key to everything?
Like a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest
If you don’t get [the] mathematics of probability into your repertoire, then you go through a long life like a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest. You’re giving a huge advantage to everybody else.’
- Dominic Cummings, On the referendum #20: the campaign, physics and data science (October, 2016)
The modern era of data driven campaigning and voter micro-targeting began with Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign who joined forces with the world’s leading data scientists to gain a granular understanding of voters psychographic profiles. This playbook has since been successfully adopted and refined by a variety of actors, from Dominic Cummings’ and his Vote Leave insurgency to meddling Russian hackers, to America’s Tweeter-in-Chief.
Here is Cummings describing how his team gained an edge on ‘establishment’ Remainers:
“One of our central ideas was that the campaign had to do things in the field of data that have never been done before. This included a) integrating data from social media, online advertising, websites, apps, canvassing, direct mail, polls, online fundraising, activist feedback, and some new things we tried such as a new way to do polling and b) having experts in physics and machine learning do proper data science in the way only they can — i.e. far beyond the normal skills applied in political campaigns.”
If I were Bloomberg my takeaway would be, data Got Brexit Done.
Data is not a Strategy
Based on the precedent of other successful campaigns powered by data, Mike Bloomberg decided to setup and fund his own “state-of-the-art data and tech startup” called Hawkfish (apparently he loves fish, and I presume he loves to see them swimming in data lakes). This subsidiary was going to be the engine at the heart of his campaign, but there was a fatal error hidden in the code.
By subscribing to the belief that data is power, Bloomberg and his team made data the strategy, and neglected critical weak points in his overall campaign strategy; weak points that were to manifest themselves in the decidedly less data driven, analog world of televised debates, political back-channeling and verbal attacks from rivals.
Five things Bloomberg missed
1.Simple sophistry — in years to come will anyone remember the most expensive political campaign in history, like they will remember ‘Yes We Can’ or ‘Make America Great Again’, or even ‘Get Brexit Done’? No, because Bloomberg’s team forgot that catch phrases embed themselves in the psyche of voters. Trump (like it or not) is the primer inter pares of simple, impactful communication. ‘Lock Her Up’, ‘Build the Wall’…are hallmarks of a stable genius, expect a new batch in 2020.
2. Charisma still counts — voters are fickle. They say they want less charismatic and more trustworthy politicians, but always complain when they get landed with a charmless technocrat (Gordon Brown replacing Tony Blair comes to mind). Bloomberg needed to exude more charm, and have more presence. As the godfather of political rhetoric, Quintus Tullius Cicero said of his brother Marcus Cicero in 64BC “you have excellent manners, are always courteous, but you can be rather stiff at times”. He could have been talking about Bloomberg during his first televised debate. He got skewered by Elizabeth Warren, and looked like a ventriloquist’s doll missing its owner.
3. Shout about your successes — Bloomberg didn’t make enough of his impressive philanthropic record supporting social causes like climate change and gun control. Neither did he play to his strengths as a genuinely successful entrepreneur (Trump, who has inherited and squandered most of his wealth, has got far more mileage tapping into the mythos of the self made man). That ain’t right.
4. Get on the front foot — in politics there is no right to be forgotten, and Bloomberg has more than a few skeletons in his closet. As Mayor of New York he implemented a controversial stop and frisk policy which disproportionately targeted young latino and black males. He never properly defended this policy, but instead waited on the ropes until the inevitable punches arrived. Then there are his litany of misogynistic comments, covering everything from “fat broads” to “horse faced lesbians”. Of course these were going to get mentioned! When challenged he did little more than shrug and say ‘maybe some people didn’t find my jokes funny’. Better still, Mayor Mike’s unfashionable views were catalogued in a compendium called Wit & Wisdom by his former Chief Marketing Officer at Bloomberg LP. I doubt she received a thank you letter after Super Tuesday.
5. Real influencers — everyone knew that older white voters without college degrees, and older black voters in southern states would be important segments for moderate candidates to get onside. The first domino in Bloomberg’s campaign fell in South Carolina, when Biden won the endorsement of James Clyburn, a key figure in southern Democratic politics and a big name in the black community. As Cicero observed in 64AD, “there are certain key men in every neighbourhood and town who exercise power”. Clyburn and his ilk should have been real world influencers Bloomberg should have invested in, instead his team were busy buying social media influencers, with far less clout.
“All his senses have but human conditions.” Henry V (4.1.105)
However sophisticated, data alone is still unable to predict pivotal moments that make or break campaigns, brands and markets. Our understanding of highly complex situations continue to rely on less quantifiable and less predictable “human conditions”, as Shakespeare called them. We have just analysed one of them, there are thousands more, past and present.
The sweat on Nixon’s brow, for instance, is said to have cost him the 1960 election. Voters sensed his frailties, and fell for the glint in JFK’s eye. They made an instinctive, subconscious decision. An all too human decision.
Bloomberg, amongst others, would be wise to create a space (in their thought, in their strategies and in their models) for intangible human factors on which key moments turn. It might even make a future $500m bet payout.
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Reading list for the 🤓
- The key tenets of successful Political Campaigns, summarised: Campaign Tips From Cicero: The Art of Politics, From the Tiber to the Potomac, Cicero and Carville, (2012)
- A good introduction to micro targeting and how voter databases learn our secrets from Privacy International (2019)
- Myth-busting investigative journalism: Cambridge Analytica’s “psychographic microtargeting”: what’s bullshit and what’s legit busts, VOX (2018)
