Trump analytics firm: Best ads emphasized ‘change’
Cambridge Analytica, a data analytics and ad firm that began working for Donald Trump’s campaign last summer, is touting its digital ad strategy for emphasizing a message of change in the crucial final weeks of the campaign.
“We found great success with more simple advertising from Mr. Trump’s speeches talking about different messages [and] different things he cared about,” Molly Schweickert, the company’s head of digital, told Yahoo News. The ads featured direct clips from his remarks at rallies. “The other thing that was effective was telling a story about an America that people believed they should have but didn’t have right now.”
One of the campaign’s most popular digital ads was called “Two Americas.” It contrasted “Hillary Clinton’s America” — filled with Syrian refugees and undocumented immigrants who committed crimes — to “Donald Trump’s America” where a helicopter and Border Patrol SUVs are manning the U.S.-Mexico border while families are kept “safe.” The campaign ran several ads along these lines, arguing that Trump’s America would be filled with jobs and prosperity, while Clinton’s would keep “Washington insiders” in charge, causing average Americans’ lives to suffer.
Schweickert said the digital ads emphasized that “everything was about to change,” a message that exit polling showed was key to his victory. Hillary Clinton’s campaign, meanwhile, focused on disqualifying Trump in voters’ minds, arguing that he lacked the experience to be president and was unfit for the job based on his insulting comments about women, racial minorities and disabled people. A CNN exit poll, however, showed that 18 percent of people who said Trump was not qualified voted for him anyway.
“Identifying the issues people were experiencing and showing a plan for how they would change kind of outweighed the experience issue,” Schweickert said.
The U.S. firm initially worked on Sen. Ted Cruz’s presidential bid, and was also hired by one of the main groups that successfully lobbied for the U.K. to leave Britain in the run-up to the Brexit vote, according to the Wall Street Journal. During Cruz’s campaign, Cambridge Analytica targeted voters based on their personality types, serving up ads that played on fear as well as other ads that tugged at heartstrings.
According to Schweickert, her company didn’t have enough time to target Trump voters based on their personalities, since she and her staff had only four months to target Trump supporters when the campaign hired them last summer. Cambridge Analytica did its best, she said, but still missed the mark on some of its key projections. Trump’s support among rural voters on Election Day ended up being 10 percentage points higher than the firm predicted, and neither the Republican National Committee nor Cambridge Analytica expected Trump to win the election, Yahoo News previously reported.
Still, the firm, which is partially owned by billionaire Trump backer Robert Mercer, says the campaign’s targeted digital ads helped drive Trump’s stunning upset last week. The firm said it was able to target specific voters with the digital ads best able to persuade them to back Trump.
Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly suggested that Cambridge Analytica created the “Two Americas” ad. It was created by the Trump campaign with the help of the firm’s data analysis.