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. This video is brought to you by Skillshare. The first 500 people to sign up with the link
in the description will get a 2 month free trial. 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. Now, if you’re interested in mastering the
data analytics that made Ripon possible, or the business knowledge of how to weave an
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the like button if you enjoyed the video. As always I want to give a big shoutout to
my patrons on Patreon. Thanks for watching and until next time: stay
smart.
