Rebekah Mercer, the press-shy 42-year-old daughter of libertarian hedge fund owner Robert Mercer has found a new line of work— running the United States of America. Disappointed by her previous management experience running a cupcake store, she now invests her time in a venture that plans to enhance the Trump brand throughout the Middle East and Indian subcontinent while also re-branding the Russian Republic. And that’s just the icing on the cake.
The vehicle for this exercise is called Cambridge Analytica, a UK-based focus group company that treats data models like Trump treats real-life models.
Focus groups are sometimes described by executives at successful companies like Apple as hocus-pocus more suited to the sideshow at a state fair than a vehicle for rational thought. Jonathan Ives, Chief Design Officer at Apple Inc. commented: "They just ensure that you don’t offend anyone, and produce bland inoffensive products."
The company owned by her father, is a major backer of Brietbart News and began the election cycle working for Ted Cruz and Ben Carson. After they managed to de-rail the Cruz and Carson campaigns they found a financial savior in her father and a needy New York real estate developer named Donald Trump. He passed on the everyday tasks to his feckless son-in-law Jared Kushner who grabbed credit for the marketing acumen, but mostly just signed the checks. Add to that, the armies of alt-reich radio hosts and anarchist anti-christs in training and a volatile stew now threathens the 238 year-old recipe called American democracy.
Cambridge Analytica fancies itself as a master of “psychographics”. The company has on file more than a million personality tests completed by Americans — online, by phone, or because someone with a clipboard approached them at a shopping center. Like many similar scientific focus group strategies, the interviewee rates themselves against 120 statements — I dislike myself; I’m the life of the party; I make rash decisions — and are graded on what psychologists call the ‘big five’ personality traits: openness, conscientiousness, agree-ableness, extroversion, and neuroticism. Basically, standard cookie-cutter focus group research supplied by elderly folks who still have landlines. And, still vote in gerry-mandered districts where waiting times are short unlike urban areas.
The chief executive, Alexander Nix, claims his ‘‘4,000–5,000 data points’ — pieces of information — on every single adult in the US from: age; gender and ethnicity; what magazines they buy; which TV programs they watch; the food they eat, the cars they drive; even the golf clubs they belong to.
All this represents a sweetened and highly refined version of the bloated direct mail industry with their emphasis on knowing the customer in ways ordinary marketing mortals cannot attain. Cambridge Analytica takes this version of marketing drivel and spins it into gold. For example, the Cruz super PAC run by Conway had been paid $950,000 .
Most telling was a $15,000 payment made to Steve Bannon, for a low budget promotional marketing video he now categorizes as a “documentary” film. Contrary to his claims of being a “Hollywood” producer, he was toiling on z-level cheapo marketing videos, barely a step above podcasts.
Rebekah Mercer doesn’t care much about money according to sources, and with a coveted seat on the Trump transition team she doesn’t have to. Her work, supported by her father’s vast fortune is done mostly from home because she is too shy to actually support her beliefs with short visits to the office. Collaboration with conservative groups like the Heritage Foundation and Federalist Society is no problem as long as the check clears. Ira Landsman, retired professor at Annendale University explained it this way: “Politics makes strange bedfellows but in this case it just lets out a big yawn. In the immortal words of Ronald Reagan: ‘I've heard that hard work never killed anyone, but I say why take the chance?’ “.