Targeted: My Inside Story of Cambridge Analytica and How Trump, Brexit and Facebook Broke Democracy

So, he said, SCL often walked into situations where clients tried to tell it what to do. Usually, a client’s idea was that they needed posters everywhere and TV adverts, Alexander said.

“Well,” he asked, “how do you know that that’s the right thing to do?”

The client raised his eyebrows.

“Because we’re not interested in the president or the party or whoever the client is,” Alexander said dismissively. “We’re interested in the audience.” He paused for a second for effect and pulled up a slide. On it was a picture of an audience in a movie theater staring up at the screen.

“The way to illustrate this,” he said, pointing to the slide, “is you want to sell more Coca-Cola in a movie theater, yeah?”

The client nodded.

“You ask an advertising agency what their plan is, and they’ll say, ‘You need more Coke at point of sale, you need Coke branding, you need a Coke advert before the main movie.” Alexander shook his head. “And it’s all about Coke,” he said. And that’s the problem with political campaigns.

“But,” he went on, clicking to another slide—this one showed images zooming left, right, and center, all of Coca-Cola advertising and branding, all quickly becoming overwhelming—“If you stop and look at the target audience and ask questions like ‘Under what circumstances would they drink more Coke?’ and you research them, you might find that they’re more likely to drink a Coke when they’re thirsty.”

Again, he paused.

“So,” he continued, “what you want to do,” he said, clicking to another slide, “is simply turn up the temperature … in the auditorium.”

The image on the slide was of a cartoon-like thermometer, the mercury in red, risen to almost bursting.

The solution, Alexander said, isn’t in the advert. “The solution is in the audience.” He paused again to make sure this had sunk in.

The solution is in the audience, I thought. It had never occurred to me to think this way.

It was a stunning moment, as eye-opening to me as what he had said in his initial presentation to Chester and me about the worthlessness of blanket advertising. Here was a brilliant concept: to get people to act, you created the conditions under which they would be more likely to do what you wanted them to do. The simplicity of the concept blew my mind.

Alexander said that SCL had done this again and again across the world.

In Trinidad and Tobago in 2010, he said, pulling up slides, the company had addressed that nation’s “mixed ethnicity.” (Half the nation was Indian, the other half Afro-Caribbean.) “Political leaders from one group there,” he said, “had difficulty making their messages resonate with those outside it.” SCL had therefore designed an ambitious program of political graffiti that it disseminated as campaign messages. And the youth vote had turned out in droves.

Brilliant, I thought. Getting out the youth vote was so difficult during elections.

In Bogotá, Colombia, in 2011, SCL had found that in a country with rampant corruption, the general population mistrusted all the candidates who were running, so SCL “enlisted others” to endorse the candidates instead. Having locals vouching for the candidate was highly effective, with no trace of the candidate’s face him- or herself.

How quickly could the Nigerians see results from SCL if it were to work in the upcoming election? the representative wanted to know.

I knew what Alexander was going to say, because I had read about it in the SCL brochures: SCL’s services were “results oriented.” The company always worked with its clients to ensure that the effects of its services were “readily identifiable and measurable.”

The representative looked pleased.

After the presentation, Alexander and I had dinner together. We spoke about the Nigerian campaign and all the other campaigns he’d done through the years, and I realized that Alexander Nix could likely be the most experienced elections consultant in the world. I began to see him as an important mentor. And while it had been difficult to get to know him in the first few weeks of the job, now he invited me to come out and visit his family or come see him play in a polo match. I was surprised when I realized that both sounded quite nice, in fact.

Then, on the day we flew back to London together, he and I had a sweet moment that almost made me feel like his equal. In keeping with the frugal SCL tradition, we had tickets in economy class, but before we boarded, he invited me to join him in the business class lounge, where we toasted our future success and drank a free glass of champagne. Cheers, we said, to the future.

Back in London, Christmas was approaching. At the company holiday party, a Prohibition-themed event, I wore a flapper’s dress with a pair of long, white gloves I’d borrowed from a dear friend who worked in costuming. I mingled with everyone I could—Pere; Sabhita; and Harris McCloud, a blond-haired, blue-eyed political messaging expert from Canada. I spoke with a few of the data scientists, including Dr. Eyal Kazin and Tadas Jucikas, Alex Tayler’s right and left hands. I wasn’t part of the team just yet; I was new, a curiosity, and it was quite hard to introduce myself in such a noisy venue. Still, I mingled and chatted with people as much as I could. Alexander wasn’t there; he was in Ghana with Ceris, to see if he could revive discussions with that country’s president. I envied his having work to occupy his mind.

Suddenly, one of the data scientists I hadn’t met yet came up to say hello. “So, how goes it in the elections-fixing business?” he asked.

I had no idea how to reply. I stood there for a moment looking at him, at the drink he was holding: an ice-cold, freshly shaken espresso martini. I was drinking the same; the glass would’ve been too cold to hold without my long, white gloves. Despite our icy beverages, I remember feeling the temperature in the room rise uncomfortably.

I don’t recall how I responded; probably with something lighthearted. After all, what was one supposed to say in reply to such a comment? And what was such a comment supposed to mean?

Around the time that I began my consultancy at SCL, I had started dating a lovely Scottish man called Tim. He was different from most of the men I had dated, and he reminded me somehow of Alexander. Tim, too, had attended British boarding schools, and came from old family money. Like Alexander in my professional life, Tim was more conservative than most people in my personal life. He worked in business development, as I had just begun to do. He was a social butterfly, the loudest and happiest person in any room. He dressed formally, in three-piece tweed suits, and was as handsome as any man gracing the cover of GQ.

I didn’t tell my family much about him—not just yet. I hadn’t had a very good experience sharing recent news. After all, when I told my mother about my new job, she had fretted.

“Oh, no,” she said, and told me she hoped I wouldn’t be giving up my PhD. I assured her I had no plans to.

There was really no home to go back to that Christmas. My family had already started packing boxes to leave our home. The idea of even trying was too dreary to contemplate. So, instead, I threw myself into my work at SCL, as if in those few short days between Christmas and the New Year, I might be able to stop things happening far away from crumbling. I followed up on the Nigerians. Perhaps that project would come through. I wanted it to; I wanted something to go right. I wished I could continue working through the holidays, to keep my mind off personal things, but the office was open only until Christmas.

In the end, Tim invited me to his family home in Scotland. Going away seemed a good way to distract myself. Tim’s parents lived in two adjoined turn-of-the-century country cottages surrounded by a perfectly manicured lawn. They were a warm and welcoming group, and I was diverted through Christmas Day with talking and drinking tea and sipping fine wine, with conversation and laughter. They made me feel right at home. Though, given what was going on with my family—something I didn’t share with Tim’s family or even Tim—this made me feel both wonderful and melancholy at the same time.

The house was so deep into the countryside that there was little cell service there. I’d asked Tim’s parents for permission to give out the number for their land line, in case of an emergency. I’d shared the number only with my mother, Alexander, Prince Idris, and the Nigerians. Alexander had said that if things went well in Madrid, we’d possibly be hearing from the prince or the Nigerian representative over the holidays.

“It’s now or never,” he had said before he left for Ghana and then a vacation with his family. The election was just over a month and a half away.

One night the phone rang. Tim’s brother ran to pick it up. I listened from the other room.

“We don’t want any of what you’re sellin’!” I heard him say in a gruff brogue. Tim’s mother was nearby, and I could hear her scrambling to take the receiver from him. She knew I was expecting important calls. When the scuffle was over, Tim’s brother returned to the room I was in, his face bright red.

“Uh, Brittany, it’s for you.” He paused. “It’s … a prince?” he said and shrugged.

Prince Idris. I gathered myself together quickly and picked up the phone. “Good evening, Your Royal Highness,” I said.

He had very good news. He had already called Alexander to tell him, and now he was reaching out to me. The Nigerians wanted to move forward—immediately. And they wanted to talk through the proposal in person. They were in DC.

Alexander, the prince said, was on holiday and couldn’t get away. “You must prepare to go and meet them yourself right away,” Prince Idris said.

After we hung up, I could hardly breathe. Surely SCL wouldn’t send me. They had senior people they could put on this. I was merely a graduate student who’d been working there for only three and a half weeks part time.

Suddenly, the phone rang again. This time it was Alexander. Before I could say anything beyond “hello,” he jumped in.

“Okay, Brits,” he said, using a nickname for me neither he nor anyone else had ever used. “Are you ready to prove yourself? These guys say they are ready to go but want to agree to the deal in person. Always close in person.”

I kept listening.

Everyone else was on vacation or unreachable, Alexander said. “That leaves you, my dear!”

I had no idea if I could really do it.

“If you really want it and you don’t think they are bullshitting us, then it’s now or never,” he continued. “If we close this, I’ll owe you one.”

4 (#ulink_1aa2e5ae-69e5-59a5-b638-4cd19a3d6619)

Davos (#ulink_1aa2e5ae-69e5-59a5-b638-4cd19a3d6619)

JANUARY–APRIL 2015