Target market research was probably okay in terms of actually producing some vague notions of what to put in ads. But it is nothing special either.
All quotes are from your link:
(In March 2017, a New York Times article said psychographics weren’t used; recent articles offer a somewhat more muddled picture.)
A year ago I doubt as much was known as now.
And a study in 2014:
Lost in the noise was something very interesting to the discussion around psychographics: the psychological effect was very small.
I'm not sure a single study on whether FB could manipulate your home page news feed to make you sad is a conclusive study that marketing has no effect. However, re "small":
Small is not the same as “no effect.” About 340,000 extra people voted in the 2010 US elections, thanks to a Facebook message, according to a study in Nature in 2012. But that’s because the message used the power of real-life social networks to get them to go: an “I voted” message showing the names of up to six friends who voted got more people to the polls. ... This only worked, the study found, if close friends had clicked “I voted.” This wasn’t an effect of advertising or psychological profiling, though. It was just peer pressure.
D'uh! That is exactly what the Russian trolls and bot farms did with the target markets guided by Cambridge Analytica data mining.
Cambridge Analytica suggests that knowing what someone liked on Facebook is enough leverage to transform elections.
This is an incredibly naive oversimplification of what data was mined and how it was utilized.
... it helps to know a little about the backstory of two ideas: microtargeting and psychographics.
Yes, so why do these two science reporters downplay the effect this had on the election?
I think people have the wrong idea about what is going on here. Reminds me of the big whoop about subliminal marketing. There is no evidence your brain reacts to the ejaculating penis hidden in the champaign bubbles ad. But it almost certainly reacts to the smell of popcorn wafting through the air during the movie intermission (when we used to have intermissions).
And [psychographics is] mostly used to sell products. Traditional demographic-based targeting will show a cleaning products ad to, say, white middle-aged women who stay at home. That’s the population most likely to buy the company’s sponge. Psychographic-based targeting, on the other hand, will show a home alarm ad to people who are neurotic because these people are more likely to be worried about safety.
Sell products? Hello. Remember or ever seen this book from 1968?
The Selling of the President: The Classical Account of the Packaging of a Candidate. A lot of people were shocked to learn that. And now they've mostly become attenuated to it. The Republicans have been beating the pants off of the Democrats for years because the GOP gets it while Democratic candidates don't. Obama did a little better but then Clinton went right back into old outdated marketing message methods and failed miserably to counter the GOP messages.
If you don't believe it, look back at the Karl Rove Playbook (court the single issue voters) and Frank Luntz's famous use of framing by choosing words which modified and/or reinforced beliefs.
Words That Work: It's Not What You Say, It's What People Hear
Then, they created ads that either aligned with or contradicted someone’s personality profile. For example, the beauty ad for extroverts told them to “dance like no one is watching (but they totally are)” and showed a woman at a crowded party. The ad for introverts showed a woman with a makeup brush and read “beauty doesn’t have to shout.” Ads that matched a personality profile got 40 percent more clicks and 50 percent more purchases than ads that didn’t match.
This is the type of research that inspired Cambridge Analytica. (One of the co-authors of that study is Michal Kosinski, who pioneered a lot of the research that the firm draws upon.) The founders were also influenced by a 2013 paper, also by Kosinski, that showed that Facebook Likes could predict sexual orientation, ethnicity, personality, IQ, and more. The research, based on over 58,000 participants, found that Facebook Likes could correctly predict whether a man was gay or straight 88 percent of the time and whether someone was a Democrat or a Republican 85 percent of the time. Some results are striking: Liking “Hello Kitty” on Facebook suggests that the user is more likely to be a Democrat, of African-American origin, and predominantly Christian, the study says.
Now, companies like Cambridge Analytica want to use psychographics and microtargeting to influence political decisions instead of consumer ones.
And there you go. That is the whole point.
And yet the authors then go on to dismiss the impact:
Even if Cambridge Analytica did affect Donald Trump’s election in 2016, everything we know about political microtargeting suggests that its role was insignificant.
Trump won by thin margins in a few key states and lost by 3 million popular votes.
How Trump won the presidency with razor-thin margins in swing states Dismissing the potential effect of the science of data mining is, like I said, naive.
And the authors lost all credibility with this very bad science to support their assertions:
The Myers-Briggs test was developed by two women at a consulting firm and the first institution to use it was the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency. The OSS used it during World War II, in addition to other personality tests, to show how to match secret agents to covert operations. And immediately after WWII, psychologists developed the F-scale to figure out who might have fascist leanings. “Cambridge Analytica doing this with Facebook is more sophisticated than what we’ve seen before, but the impulse behind it — to try to figure out people’s political leanings through personality — is by no means new,” says Emre.
Myers-Briggs has failed miserably when peer reviewed by qualified researchers. And it has been thoroughly reviewed. It amounts to a fad that is
[wait for it] very well marketed to HR departments. People selling seminars to teach your HR department how to use it make millions.
