Cambridge Analytica: a company that sparks controversy wherever it appears.
Between the massive data leaks at Facebook and the questionable impact the company has
had on the Brexit referendum and Trump’s election, today you would be hard pressed
not to have heard about Cambridge Analytica.
And yet, despite all the recent media coverage of this company, one name has remained surprisingly
absent from the headlines.
The man who is at the heart of the infamous organization barely gets mentioned at all:
even Wikipedia’s 4000-word article on the company mentions him only once, as if he is
a brief sidenote, barely worthy of recognition.
But in reality quite the opposite is true: over the past 30 years this man, Nigel Oakes,
has established a global psyops empire.
Today we’ll learn the full story behind Cambridge Analytica: how it started and what
it’s doing today.
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Now, just to set the record straight: Nigel Oakes is the founder and CEO of the parent
company of Cambridge Analytica, but the really interesting story is how he got there.
Way back in the 1970s, Nigel attended Eton College, the boarding school that has for
centuries educated the British elite and aristocracy.
Now, Nigel himself was born into a much more modest family of British veterans, but suffice
to say he made the most of his education.
Within a few years of graduating, he made headlines in Britain for his romantic relationship
with Lady Helen Windsor, a member of the extended royal family.
In 1985 he made headlines again this time by gate-crashing Lady Windsor’s 21st birthday
party at Windsor Castle, for which he got arrested and was fined a total of £155, a
rather symbolic punishment.
Now, at the time, Nigel was a record producer and DJ, but just two years later in 1987 he
joined one of the leading advertising agencies in Britain: Saatchi & Saatchi.
This agency was responsible for one of the most famous political posters of the 20th
century, which ushered in the era of Margaret Thatcher and the Tories.
So out of nowhere, Nigel joins this company as a “senior producer”.
Once there he develops a deep interest in psychology and its effects on group behavior.
But his practical knowledge isn’t enough, so he hires respected academics to fill in
the blanks of his methodology.
This leads to the creation of the Behavioural Dynamics Institute, Nigel’s first major
company.
Interestingly enough, if you try to visit their website now you’re gonna find a blank
page.
As far as I can tell they took down their website on 22 March, 2018, but luckily there’s
an archived version, which tells us that the Institute was responsible for at least a decent
volume of research.
Within two years of BDI’s creation, Nigel felt confident enough to use it for commercial
purposes.
In 1992 he created Marketing Aromatics, a company whose mission was to influence behavior
through smell.
Now, Nigel’s clients at the time were other companies just looking for a way to boost
their sales, and suffice to say the business wasn’t exceptionally profitable.
Marketing Aromatics would exist for less than 4 years because Nigel quickly realized that
it was governments who would be his ideal client.
Thus, Nigel shifted gears and began targeting elections in less developed countries, starting
in 1993 with his new company: Strategic Communications Laboratories, or SCL.
As someone versed in the ways of psychology, Nigel knew that he needed to impress his clients
in order to win them over.
To that end he hired the same company that worked on the sets of the James Bond movie
Goldeneye to create his offices in a similar style across all the countries he operated
in.
He kept away from the public eye, but in his rare interviews he spoke of SCL in a rather
bombastic fashion: he said that they “employ the same techniques as Aristotle and Hitler,
[appealing] to people on an emotional level”.
But despite his rhetoric, Nigel’s methods proved less than successful.
From the little information that’s available we know that in the year 2000 SCL was engaged
in a campaign to improve the image of Indonesia’s new democratic government after 31 years of
dictatorship.
The methods SCL reportedly used were less than exemplary: they hosted seminars and bought
TV ads in the names of unrelated nonprofits and even USAID, which of course wasn’t involved.
In one particular instance SCL tried to get newspapers to publish articles about a secret
intelligence report supporting the government that was actually made up.
Nigel’s methods proved ineffective, for the government was deposed less than a year
later.
The situation soured so much that Nigel was forced to flee to Singapore.
A similar project, complete with its own James Bond operations center in Bangkok, is known
to have happened in June 1999, but the details are basically nonexistent.
The only thing we know is that it ended badly and the excuse given by the government was
that Nigel had violated immigration laws.
Now, today SCL boasts to have operated in over 100 countries, but the Indonesia incident
is the first one with any significant media coverage.
Before that Nigel appears to have worked in South Africa in 1994 and in 4 Caribbean countries
between 1995 and 1999.
We know next to nothing about these early campaigns other than the fact that they happened,
but we do know that by the late 2000s SCL was struggling financially.
Clients were hard to come by and with each campaign bringing in only between $200,000
and $2 million a piece, SCL was in dire straits.
To the rescue comes Alexander Nix.
Like Nigel, he was a graduate of Eton and was likely well connected.
He joined SCL in 2003 and by 2007 he was a director and significant shareholder.
It was his idea to shift focus away from developing countries and towards Europe and the US.
But the methods Nigel had employed in Southeast Asia were unlikely to work in the West, so
Alexander needed a new technique.
He wouldn’t find it until 2013, when he hired a man you might be familiar with: Christopher
Wylie, who recently gave testimony to the UK government.
Now, Chris was a data genius: he had left high school at the age of 16 and was involved
in political campaigns in Canada and Great Britain while he was still a teenager.
Chris assembled a team of equally gifted programmers and data analysts to create a powerful program
for SCL.
Chris and his friends worked in Canada, so a company was incorporated there for this
purpose in 2013: AggregateIQ.
The program they created came to be known as Ripon, a reference to Ripon, Wisconsin,
the birthplace of the Republican Party.
Their application is essentially a giant data warehouse that contains as much information
as possible about a given voter’s identity.
Specifically, it contains demographics, voting history, and party affiliation.
On top of that, the voter’s profile is supplemented with literally any data that’s available:
from magazine subscriptions to credit scores.
A complex model uses all of this data to create exceptionally well targeted ads in favor of
a specific political candidate.
SCL acquired this data from various sources, some public and others not.
The most infamous example is the Facebook data of at least 87 million users, which was
acquired under the false pretenses of “academic purposes”.
Alexander Nix paid $1.4 million for it, or just over 1 cent per person.
But all the data in the world would be useless if nobody would buy it, so Nix and Chris set
about finding potential clients.
In the fall of 2013 they pitched the idea to Steve Bannon, who at the time was running
Breitbart News.
Now Bannon was a close friend to Robert Mercer, a hedge fund billionaire who since 2006 has
donated $35 million to the Republican Party.
Robert was very interested in the Ripon platform and he eventually agreed to invest $5 million
in SCL’s latest venture: a subsidiary called Cambridge Analytica that was created specifically
to operate in the US.
To entice Republicans, Robert would donate to their campaigns in exchange for them hiring
Cambridge Analytica.
The first major client of Cambridge Analytica was Ted Cruz, but it turns out that he never
got to use Ripon even after spending almost $6 million on it.
According to Cruz, the platform was full of bugs and wasn’t being developed at a proper
pace.
One theory suggests the following explanation: while Ted Cruz was busy campaigning, the staff
at AggregateIQ was directing their full attention towards Great Britain ahead of the Brexit
vote.
There they seem to have had a much more significant impact, at least economically: in fact, 40%
of the Leave campaign’s entire budget was spent on AggregateIQ.
Right now the British government is investigating whether AggregateIQ and the Leave campaign
broke election spending laws by shifting money around through several different organizations.
Now, whether the Ripon platform had any effect on the Brexit vote is hard to say, even considering
how close it was.
The situation with Trump’s election is a similar story.
The Trump campaign spent $6 million on Cambridge Analytica, but $5 million of that went towards
TV ads.
Campaign staff is more-or-less in agreement that the company had very little to do with
Trump’s victory, and while there are conflicting accounts, one particular source points towards
a potential endgame for Cambridge Analytica.
Supposedly, Alexander Nix and Nigel Oakes were hoping to leverage Cambridge Analytica’s
publicity around Brexit and Trump (regardless of any actual involvement there) with the
idea of selling the company and its incomplete platform to the highest bidder.
That way Nix could fade away from the current mess and Nigel would be free to continue his
election business in developing countries.
Unfortunately for them, Christopher Wylie decided to share his story with the Guardian,
and that’s how this whole scandal came into view.
Considering just how bad the situation is, it’s unlikely that the business Nigel and
Alexander had going would remain around for much longer.
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