What If Cambridge Analytica Did Everything Right?

What if Cambridge Analytica’s powerful ability to change the behavior of masses of people was washed clean of all moral and ethical issues?

Cambridge Analytica, for anyone who has somehow avoided hearing all this, was a British company that stole enormous amounts of information from social media posts. They kept track of who said what. And they used that information to create precisely targeted messages designed to manipulate individuals with their own prejudices and fears.

They were paid a lot of money to topple governments and, according to numerous reports, accepted a million dollars a day to help a reality TV-show host become President of the United States.

But let’s take a step back for a moment and think about what they accomplished: they were able to change the behavior of large masses of people. This has been the holy grail of countless legitimate industries for a very long time. Public relations, advertising, politics, not-for-profits...all seek to change the behavior of large groups of people to accomplish their objectives.

Pretty much all of us have been convinced to quit smoking. Drinking and driving is definitely not cool. We are working hard to change behavior around single-use plastics that end up clogging our oceans. We all know that condoms stop the spread of AIDS.

“In fact, we are a society that relies on changing the behavior of large groups of people to get things done.” says David Allison, Founder of the Valuegraphics Database.

“We’ve built what some people have called the white-hat good-guy version of Cambridge Analytica. It’s an opt-in, fully transparent, easily reversible, anonymized database that is more rigorous than you need for a handful of PhDs’s from Harvard.”

“We’ve measured what everyone in the world cares about: what they value. And as any first-year sociologist will tell you, what we value determines what we do. Now we can profile a target audience for anything, anywhere in the world, and use their shared values to trigger behaviors.”

The math supports the claim that Valuegraphics can boost the performance of every dollar an organization spends trying to influence an audience by as much as 8X compared to using demographics and/or psychographics alone. And this isn’t a theoretical idea: Allison has used the database for clients around the world in industries as diverse as sportswear, real estate development, hedge funds, restaurants, hotels, shopping malls, and associations. Notably, as of November 2019, he’s started to deliver on his ultimate goal: to give the data away for free to global humanitarian organizations and make the world a better place.

 “People call me a demographic-disruptor,” Allison says.  “I’m fine with that. But if I had my way I’d also be known as a values-advocate, The two go hand-in-hand. Demographics have been broken for decades now. And values are the new best-practice for any organization trying to get things done.”