I felt like I'd spent many years making excuses for my executives and making excuses for political candidates I was representing and their views, when some of those political views, in my mind, were very distasteful.
Our data has been harvested, collected, modeled, and monetized - sometimes sold on as raw data, and sometimes licensed just for advertisers to be able to target us.
The use of data for political purposes wasn't invented by Cambridge Analytica. It started when I was on the Obama campaign in 2007-2008. We invented social media strategy.
Every time you work on a political campaign, half the people hate you. That's how it is.
In order to create predictive algorithms, you need to have a training set. So, that training set is created through our quantitative surveys. Those surveys need to include either basic market research questions or basic political polling questions, which might be added to get your opinion on a brand or an issue or a candidate.
I was like: the narrative should be that the work that we did was never paid for so Leave.E.U., by not registering that we did that work, are the ones that should be in trouble.
The bigger a data set that you have, the more polls, the more surveys that you have that people undertake, the more accurate your models are going to be. That's just a fact of data science.
To be honest, it's hard when you're knee-deep in the trenches of an industry to see it how others see it.
Ukip had undertaken a survey on why people wanted to leave the E.U. or not, and they also had membership data. So we were able to build personas out of that. That was work that would normally be paid for.
Data is the most valuable asset in the world.
