Long Before Cambridge Analytica, a Belief in the ‘Power of the Subliminal’

Nearly three decades ago, an ambitious young London advertising executive named Nigel Oakes fell out with his partners, two psychologists, over a central claim of his new business: That using the tools of social science, he could plant motivations in a person’s brain without their knowledge, prompting them to behave as a client wished. …

For years, Mr. Oakes kept trying, convinced he was on to something. But there was no breakthrough until the United States and its allies occupied Afghanistan and Iraq and began looking for contractors to win “hearts and minds.” The ad man rebranded himself as a psychological operations specialist, founder of an organization called Strategic Communication Laboratories, and money started to flow.

Today, Mr. Oakes’s SCL Group — which spawned many smaller companies, including the American political consultancy Cambridge Analytica — is at the center of a trans-Atlantic scandal over data mining and voter manipulation. CONT.

Ellen Barry, New York Times