The Trump campaign repeatedly has either denied or downplayed the role Cambridge Analytica played in its 2016 online efforts, but a new independent investigation has turned up digital evidence showing Trump likely did use CA data for targeted online ad campaigns.
Now a New York digital-marketing consultant has unearthed a trove of digital artifacts from Trump’s social-media campaign that provides the first hard evidence that Team Trump made continuous use of audience lists created by Cambridge Analytica to target a portion of its “dark ads” on Facebook. The ads were deployed from July 2016 through the end of the election—and beyond, to the inauguration in January 2017.
A Trump 2016 campaign official confirmed those findings to The Daily Beast, but claimed that Cambridge Analytica built the audience lists from the RNC’s database of voters and not its internal data store.
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Emily Las, a digital marketer and former VP at MasterCard, has spent the last year extracting remnants of Trump’s Facebook campaign through and beyond Election Day 2016. So far, her work has unearthed more than 1,200 tracking links for different Trump ads, and live content for hundreds of the ads.
That’s a minuscule slice of a campaign that reportedly launched 5.9 million ads, but every tracking link carries a DNA strand of data about the overall campaign in the form of UTM (“Urchin Tracking Module”) codes. These codes, long cryptic sequences of characters, allow an advertiser to track an ad’s performance.
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The most intriguing tidbits in the UTM codes are those that categorize the Facebook “audience” being targeted—meaning a set of users picked to receive a certain ad, or to serve as a template for Facebook’s “lookalike audience” matching feature. In about 10 percent of her tracking links, the audience is described as “CambridgeAudience” or “CambridgeAnalytica.
Brad Parscale, Trump's 2016 digital media director and 2020 campaign manager, has claimed he only wanted CA for its personnel, not its product.
In Parscale’s account, he was never interested in Cambridge Analytica’s vaunted databases, just its people. In particular, Parscale had been eager to poach the firm’s product chief, data guru Matt Oczkowski. When he couldn’t hire Oczkowki away from the firm, he resorted to engaging the company as a kind of high-end temp agency just to get Oczkowski and his team to San Antonio.
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As for what Cambridge’s team actually did, Parscale said they “mainly ran polling, visualization, and support staff for all of the things we needed to do.” He emphasized again that he didn’t “hire Cambridge Analytica… for any of their data.”
But Oczkowski himself once admitted something different.
Cambridge’s Oczkowski, who’s now working for Trump 2020 through his own firm, has backed up that claim following Cambridge’s scandals. Prior to those scandals, though, he explicitly described Cambridge’s dataset as part of the Trump operation.
In a December 2016 Google roundtable discussion, Oczkowski expounded on the complexity of bootstrapping Trump’s social-media campaign from three disparate data sources, including Cambridge Analytics.
“On the targeting piece, we’re talking about building a database, working with the RNC, the Alamo database, and then leveraging Cambridge’s database,” he said. “Combining those three things together, building partisanship models, 12 issue sets, the basic building blocks you need from a campaign.”
If Oczkowski misspoke, the other Trump campaign officials on the panel didn’t say anything, including the RNC’s Gary Coby, who served as Trump’s digital ads and fundraising director, and Parscale himself.
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In addition to the tracking links, Las has discovered and documented hundreds of Trump 2016 dark posts that are still alive deep in Facebook’s servers. Hidden outside the reach of Facebook’s search engine and not displayed on any timeline, the ads, including nearly 500 distinct videos, arefindable only by those who know the link.
But Las tells The Daily Beast she has not found evidence of targeted voter suppression which was why she started looking into the Facebook code in the first place.
“There’s nothing in here that feels like it’s about suppression,” she said. After a year of searching, “I don’t think it exists.”
Cambridge Analytica’s Real Role in Trump’s Dark Facebook Campaign (Daily Beast)