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Well that's the snag for me: Was this sophisticated marketing or a breach of UK electoral law (outside cash / influence)
The jury us still out on that. If course everyone is free to use the same legal (though obtrusive perhaps) marketing techniques.
JWestland-
With the Leave campaign funding it seems like the law certainly wasn't sufficient. Loopholes were utilised 'not in the spirit' and possibly with massive effect.
I totally think UK politics is vulnerable to manipulation. Our laws are pretty quaint.
In the US it is quite normal for individual politicians to take private funding. That corruption is absolute cancer, it produces on-message but totally disingenuous puppets and then anti-puppet muppets like Trump. All the campaign 'products' are going to be developed for this political culture (the largest market).
:-(
miro_o
Sry not sry for the dredge.
Most of this isn't new (some of the personal connections highlighted are new to me). Analysts in washington are trying to reverse engineer how the Trump campaign targetted content to selective groups of black voters but it will take time. There is no doubt it was sophisticated (mis)use of data.
I think it's worth considering that these techniques are becoming known marketing tools and if the Hillary or the UK Better Together campaigns (both with significantly better funding than their opposition) weren't using these techniques then why not? I don't presume they rejected the idea based on principle. Maybe complacency?