Where you are, what you buy and your age. These are the kinds of attributes that digital marketers commonly employ for targeting.
London-based Cambridge Analytica is adding an additional layer: psychology. With US offices in New York City and Washington, DC, the company is now redirecting its psychological targeting from national security and political clients — including Donald Trump — to commercial ones.
Chief data officer Alex Tayler pointed out to me that most marketing uses demographics, geographics and psychographics. Demographics include age, gender and cultural group; geographics is your location and neighborhood; and psychographics — as used in commercial marketing — tracks people’s purchasing behavior. These categories are key to creating the audience segments that marketers commonly use for ad and other targeting.
His company adds personality data, based around five fundamental traits that govern how people view the world around them. Called the Ocean traits, they are Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism. The various intensities of the traits form the basis of 32 different personality styles.
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