Digital Marketing has revolutionised the marketing landscape. Its application in political campaigns however, raises concerns. Read on to understand how Digital Marketing techniques can compromise a Democracy.

Digital Political Marketing

When we think of Marketing or Digital Marketing what are we picturing? For many people, what comes to mind is the promotion of products and services. The term however, is far more expansive, encompassing the marketing of organisations, persons and ideas. Political campaigns fall into this category. Today’s campaigns have adapted to the digital marketing environment and have reaped the rewards of its increased effectiveness. With this effectiveness, however, comes a more sinister application of these Digital marketing techniques. In this article, I will discuss some of the major problems with digital marketing and how when applied to political campaigns they can damage democracies.

Digital Segmentation

Market segmentation is the process of distinguishing customers based on different variables to divide the market into targetable groups. It is an essential element of digital political marketing. Big Data contributes to a highly effective and accurate system of segmentation. This accuracy is where many of the problems arise.  Political campaign’s segmentation in the past was dependent on data from voluntary surveys. Social media transformed segmentation as campaigns now can gain direct insights into voter behaviour, greatly enhancing the ability to segment the population (Tufekci, 2014).

Information asymmetry

This segmentation substantially increases the information asymmetries that exist between the population and the data purveyors (Tufekci, 2014). Shoshana Zuboff author of “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” explains this as:

“A one-way mirror, they can see us, they cant take whatever they want but we can’t see them, or what they are doing“

Zuboff, S., 2019. Exponential View With Azeem Azhar, Season 3, Episode 12 Surveillance Capitalism.

Although users consent to this data, social media sites coerce this consent by holding the usability of their sites hostage if we don’t consent (Tufekci, 2014). Social media is an integral part of the public sphere but one cannot take part unless they agree to the collection of this data (Zuboff, 2019). There is no choice.  Social media users are unaware of how commercial and political marketers both collect their data and what they do with the resulting information. We have come to the understanding that commercial marketers are gathering and using our data for our benefit so they can tailor product offerings to suit our needs (Wedel and Kannan, 2016). In political campaigns, this two-way benefit does not exist. Instead, our information is benefiting politicians who seek to fulfil their political ambitions and gain power. We have no option but to willingly participate. 

Populism Pandering

The effectiveness of digital voter segmentation can be seen in the rise of voter modelling. Big Data enables campaigns to precisely model individual voters without voters knowing (Tufekci, 2014). Modelling allows campaigns to segment the population as individuals as opposed to part of a group (Tufekci, 2014). This is dangerous as it enables politicians to manipulate the public by serving them with personalised messages (Tufekci, 2014). To understand this, it is helpful to view a candidate as a product. The campaign behind this product however, can change the product attributes to situate themselves with different voter segments. A prime example of this can be seen in 2016 when voter modelling gave Trump an unprecedented understanding of the electorate and what topics could rally the most support amongst different segments. This guided his dangerous but effective communication strategy of merely mirroring the beliefs and attitudes of voter segments (Conley, 2018). This pandering has produced a situation where populism has replaced democratic leadership (Henneburg, 2004).

Micro-targeting

Once a campaign segments its voters how exactly does it target them? The answer revolves around micro-targeting, which adds another dimension to the problematic nature of digital political marketing. Micro-targeting gives campaigns this ability to deliver customised messages to specific demographics and test in real-time to see how they respond (Scott and Dipayan, 2020). When a message gets the desired response it is integrated to suit a campaigns target audience (Scott and Dipayan, 2020).  There exist several problems that arise from these techniques.

Increased Societal Tension

Individually targeted messages present serious implications for civic discourse (Tufekci. 2014). These messages are designed to manipulate social media’s opaque algorithms whose primary goal is to keep people on their sites (Scott and Dipayan, 2020). As a result, polarizing issues like abortion and immigration are prioritised instead of important policy discussions (Tufeki, 2014). Societal tension haS thus increased and the factionalism has spread (Rose-Stockwell, 2020). Digital Marketing directly enables what is called dog-whistle politics where the promotion of a provocative position is advertised to those that wish to see it (Tufekci, 2014). Viewed in this light it is difficult to differentiate these techniques from the political propaganda of the past where:

“Something is provided for all so that nobody escapes”

(Adorno in Tufekci, 2014, p5).

Fake News

To make matters worse these individualised messages are predisposed to misinformation which is extremely difficult to correct (Heawood, 2020). This can be seen in the 2016 Russian interference in the US election where Russian agents hijacked social media algorithms to spread fake news and inflame bipartisan divisions (Scott and Dipayan, 2020). Their attempts were successful and their techniques have been labelled as Digital Marketing 101.

Psychological Targeting

Unfortunately, the negative implications of Digital marketing don’t end with micro-targeting, as even more sinister implications can be observed in psychological targeting. Psychological targeting is an evolution of psychographic messaging that campaigns have been using for decades to spark an emotional response and deepen the relationship with voters (Chester and Montgomery, 2017). Digital marketing has taken this core premise of focusing on their audience’s emotions and produced psychological targeting. Psychological targeting is “Influencing the behaviour of large groups of people by tailoring persuasive appeals to the psychological needs of the target audience” (Matz et al., 2017). The Cambridge Analytica scandal of 2016 exposed everything that is wrong with psychological targeting.  By gathering user data from Facebook without consent they developed their OCEAN personality model which rated American voters on five factors:

• Openness
• Conscientiousness
• Extroversion
• Agreeableness
• Neuroticism

The Trump campaign then used this information to target voters based on these attributes. At first glance, the obvious concern is that users didn’t consent for their data to be used in this context . Read more on the best practices for using Big Data in digital marketing. A bigger concern however, is the manipulative intent behind the model which was purposefully designed to identify persuadable voters and target them based on their vulnerabilities (Chester and Montgomery, 2017). How is a democracy supposed to function in this secretive and manipulative manner?

Bibliography

Chester, J. and Montgomery, K., 2017. The role of digital marketing in political campaigns. Internet Policy Review, 6(4).

Conley, B., 2018 .” Thinking What He Says: Market Research and the Making of Donald Trump’s 2016 Presidential Campaign” in – Political Marketing In The 2016 U.S. Presidential Election, eds. Jamie Gillies, Cham: Palgrave Studies in Political Marketing and Management, pp. 29-44.

Heawood, J., 2020. Pseudo-Public Political Speech: Democratic Implications Of The Cambridge Analytica Scandal. [online] Informationpolity.com. Available at: <https://informationpolity.com/news-blog/pseudo-public-political-speech-democratic-implications-cambridge-analytica-scandal> [Accessed 6 December 2020].

Henneberg, S., 2004. The views of an advocatus dei: political marketing and its critics. Journal of Public Affairs, 4(3), pp.225-243.

Matz, S., Kosinski, M., Kosinski, D. and Nave, G., 2017. Psychological targeting as an effective approach to digital mass persuasion. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114(48).

Rose-Stockwell, J., 2020. The Dark Psychology Of Social Networks. [online] The Atlantic. Available at: <https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/12/social-media-democracy/600763/> [Accessed 9 December 2020].

Scott, B. and Dipayan, D., 2020. Russia’s Election Interference Is Digital Marketing 101. [online] The Atlantic. Available at: <https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/02/russia-trump-election-facebook-twitter-advertising/553676/> [Accessed 16 December 2020].

Schwartz, M., 2020. Facebook Failed To Protect 30 Million Users From Having Their Data Harvested By Trump Campaign Affiliate. [online] The Intercept. Available at: <https://theintercept.com/2017/03/30/facebook-failed-to-protect-30-million-users-from-having-their-data-harvested-by-trump-campaign-affiliate/> [Accessed 1 December 2020].

Tufekci, Z., 2014. Engineering the public: Big data, surveillance and computational politics. First Monday: Peer-reviewed journal on the internet, Volume 19(Number 7).

Wedel, M. and Kannan, P., 2016. Marketing Analytics for Data-Rich Environments. Journal of Marketing, Vol 80(Issue 6).

Zuboff, S., 2019. Exponential View With Azeem Azhar, Season 3, Episode 12 Surveillance Capitalism.