9 January 2019 (Saint-Malo, France) — One of the big news stories today is the top official in Trump’s campaign, Paul Manafort, shared political polling data with a business associate tied to Russian intelligence, according to a court filing unsealed yesterday. The document provided the clearest evidence to date that the Trump campaign may have tried to coordinate with Russians during the 2016 presidential race.
One of the most interesting views on all of this comes not from a legal or political pundit but from a guy in advertising, David Measer. Eric De Grasse (my business partner and the Chief Technology Officer for my group of companies) ran into him at CES 2019 in Las Vegas. I know David from the advertising world, as Senior Vice President of Strategic Planning for RPA Advertising, and we run into each other at the Cannes Lions advertising trade show/conference held in France every May. He is also an Adjunct Professor at the USC Annenberg School of Communications.
RPA Advertising will be proving us a marvellous view on marketing and the technology sector for our CES 2019 wrap-up.
David posted this on his blog and also Twitter … and it is brilliant:
I'm just an advertising guy, but thought I'd put a marketing lens on the news of Manafort sharing "polling data" with a Russian operative.
Seems benign in the grand scope of everything, right? It's not.
Like politics, the goal of advertising is persuasion. And like politics, we call our efforts a campaign. At the heart of any campaign, big or small, is data. Data about the market, people, the competition. In politics, this is called "polling." Same thing.
Data is the raw material in the battle that brands fight to win hearts and minds, and get people to choose one
product over another. To vote with their wallets.
Gleaning the data is very expensive, it's labor intensive, and it takes a LOT of time. Big companies will spend
hundreds of millions on various versions of this undertaking, and employ thousands of people. The results of all this data, and the way it's sliced and diced, is kept behind firewalls, under lock & key, privileged access.
Data (polls) is one of the most valuable resources a company has.
Anyone who works for a major company knows that Big Data is the business battle of our time. What do we do with the data? We use it to decide who to target. To position the brand as distinctive from other brands. To
develop messaging and ads. To de-position and conquest the competition (and lots more).
Back to Manafort.
Sharing polling data with anyone is opening a door to collaborate with them. It's allowing them to use your raw materials, your valuable resources, your manpower.
It's like arms dealing, except the weapons can't be tracked because no one knows they're explosive except for
the collaborators.
Sharing polling data means you're working together. Conspiring. Making decisions together. Working to destroy
the competition.
Imagine for a moment if Apple and Microsoft collaborated on pooling their data resources in an attempt to bringdown Samsung ...
But there's SOMETHING EVEN MORE IMPORTANT TO THE STORY.
To continue the analogy, imagine that Apple and MSFT then together hacked into Samsung's servers and stole
some of their proprietary data, in the form of emails about their data ...
Then it'd be game over.
So, if you've got Manafort sharing valuable and proprietary data with a Russian intelligence operative, and
you've got a Russian hacking operation stealing the competition's (the DNC's and the Clinton campaign's) data...then you've got it all.
Everything you need to destroy the competition.
Not so benign anymore.
You know who knows a lot about this? Kellyanne Conway. Someone should ask her.