Success has many fathers and failure is an orphan.
The big mystery of Big Data is causation versus correlation.
I must emphatically state that Cambridge Analytica does not condone or engage in entrapment, bribes or so-called 'honeytraps', and nor does it use untrue material for any purpose.
The idea of applying psychology or behavioural sciences to communication is not a new one. It's very old behavioural economics. If it gives you some additional insights - so be it.
We are fundamentally politically agnostic and an apolitical organization.
There's no question that the marketing and advertising world is ahead of the political marketing the political communications world.
My long-term ambition is to be an agent of change.
Look, fundamentally the more you know about someone, the better you can communicate with them at a human level, or a mass-communication-advertising level.
Starting with politics, we'd like to replace blanket advertising with individualised targeted and engagement ads.
Well, we'll look at the hundred thousand type A personalities, and then we'll have a look at the corresponding data points that we have on those hundred thousand people. We'll have a look at what attributes they have in common and then we'll build a model based on that.
We use nearly 5 thousand different data points about you to craft and target a message. The data points are not just a representative model of you. The data points are about you, specifically.
Every day we have teams looking for new data sets.
The company started in the early 90s or late 80s. We were a behavioural science company. We didn't pivot into data analytics till 2012. So, all the data that we collected pre-2012, which was done by the British company SBL group, was collected through quantitive and qualitative research on the ground.
We didn't do Brexit. We didn't get money for it. We didn't do work for it. We didn't sign a contract.
We never worked in Russia. We never worked for Russia. I want to be careful, but I don't think we have any Russian employees in our company whatsoever. We just don't have business in Russia. We have no involvement with Russia, never have done.
I'm not going to speak about any of our investors or board members at all because we don't.
We leave our personal ideologies at the door... We only work for mainstream political parties.
As the internet of things grows, as we have sensors on everything: cars, fridges, TVs then data is going to become ubiquitous.
We steer clear of fringe political parties or minority groups. We're not trying to orchestrate a revolution.
You can collect Facebook data legally with the consent of the Facebook users and the consent of Facebook.
