The Man Behind Cambridge Analytica
Cambridge Analytica; a company that sparks controversy wherever it appears. Between the massive data leaks at Facebook and the questionable impact the company has handled the Brexit referendum and Trump’s election, 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 was at the heart of the infamous organization barely gets mentioned at all; Nigel Oakes.
Nigel in his early days
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 Eaton 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 Ellen 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 pounds, 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.
The birth of Cambridge Analytica
This agency was responsible for one of the most famous political bolsters 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 effect 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 Behavioral Dynamics Institute, Nigel’s first major company. Interestingly enough, if you try to visit their website now, you’re going to find a blank page. As far as I can tell, they took down their website on the 22nd of March, 2018, but luckily there’s an archived version that tells us that the Institute was responsible for at least a decent volume of research. Within two years of BDIs 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 a way to boost their sales and suffice to say the business wasn’t exceptionally profitable. Marketing Aromatics would exist for less than four years because Nigel quickly realized that it was the government’s who would be his ideal client.
Politics and mass manipulations
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 available information, 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 made-up secret intelligence report supporting the government. 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 operation 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.
The trail of SCL’s past work
Now today, SCL boasts to have operated in over a hundred 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 four 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 apiece as SCL was in dire straights.
To the rescue comes Alexander Nix, also a graduate of Eaton and also likely well-connected. He joined SCL in 2003 and by 2007 he was a director and significant shareholder.
It was his (Alexander Nix)idea to focus away from developing countries and towards Europe and the U.S.
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. He 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.
How they collected the data
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 SCLs, his latest venture, a subsidiary called Cambridge Analytica that was created specifically to operate in the U.S.
The abuse of data for political gains
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 he never got to use Ripon even after spending almost $6 million on it. According to Cruz, the platform was full of bugs and it wasn’t being developed at a proper pace.
One theory suggests the following explanation: while Ted Cruz was busy campaigning, the staff at AggregateIQ were directing their full attention towards Great Britain ahead of the Brexit vote.
There they seemed 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 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 end game 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 bitter.
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 a much longer.
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