Brad Parscale is a Marketing, branding and website designer, who was going about his business building up clientele back in San Antonio, Texas when he’d received a very serendipitous email from “Kathy K” at trump.org.
She was looking for someone to design a website for a Trump real estate project. Parscale bid the lowest and got the job. What followed were other Trump projects (websites), such as Melania’s skincare line, Eric’s (Trump) foundation, and the family’s wineries.
In early 2015, another email came saying that Trump was thinking about running for President, and needed a website built in two days! Parscale designed this for Fifteen hundred dollars. This has turned into a ninety-four million dollar project.
It seems this 6’8″ man from Topeka Kansas had become the Trump campaign’s secret weapon. His key job was to “send out carefully tailored, low-cost digital ads to millions of people.” He was the man who oversaw the digital marketing campaign. As time went on, his portfolio grew as did the number of employees he managed.
Of course, we all know how President Trump has “the Jimmy Thumps,” when it comes to his frequent use of Twitter. This, according to Parscale is his method of “talking to the people.”
Though Facebook has claimed to be “anti-Trump,” it turns out that it was an incredibly useful tool for securing the votes that got him elected.
Facebook, Google and Twitter staff (Republican), were embedded in the Trump campaign. According to 60MINUTES.COM (the American television newsmagazine), the Democrats were also offered an “embed,” but turned it down. Brad Parscale has stated that the use of micro-targeting was “on a scale never seen before.”
In key moments, this platform was utilized to “customize their ads for individual votes.” There were easily a hundred thousand different ads placed on a daily basis, through Facebook, but more specifically, multiple versions of the same ad. They might change depending on what would grab someone’s attention. For example, one ad would focus on childcare, another on taxes, yet another on energy.
Parscale was criticized for “taking micro-targeting too far,” because he’d hired “Cambridge Analytica” They’d used what was called “Psychographics, that micro-target ads based on personality.” One ad might be directed to an “extrovert,” one message targeted to a “neurotic.” There was definitely a concern with using “Behavioural Micro-targeting, that it somehow had ‘Orwellian Overtones.” Parscale scoffs at the idea that it was somehow “sinister.”
According to 60MINUTES.COM, Cambridge Analytica claims they were “key” to Trump’s victory, but Parscale is quick to say that in the end, he’d decided against using their services because “it didn’t work,” not because he felt it was “wrong.”
It is more than ironic that, Social platforms have all been invented by “very liberal people on the West and east coasts, but this previously unknown marketing director (Parscale), figured out how to use it to push conservative values, and win.
