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THREAD: 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.

Imaging for a moment if Apple and Microsoft collaborated on pooling their data resources in an attempt to bring down 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 operationg stealing the competition's (the DNC's and the Clinton campaign's) data...then you've got it all.





Not so benign anymore.



You know who knows a lot about this? Everything you need to destroy the competition.Not so benign anymore.You know who knows a lot about this? @KellyannePolls -- someone should ask her.

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