The spokesman also said neither Cambridge nor SCL had done any work, paid or unpaid, with the pro-“Brexit” Leave.eu campaign last year, although Mr. Nix once claimed
that Cambridge had helped “supercharge” Leave.eu’s social media campaign.
But a dozen Republican consultants and former Trump campaign aides, along with current
and former Cambridge employees, say the company’s ability to exploit personality profiles — “our secret sauce,” Mr. Nix once called it — is exaggerated.
One brochure circulated to clients this year, which details Cambridge’s expertise in behavioral targeting, also calls
the company’s “pivotal role” in electing Mr. Trump its “biggest success politically in the United States.”
Trump aides, though, said Cambridge had played a relatively modest role, providing personnel who worked alongside
other analytics vendors on some early digital advertising and using conventional microtargeting techniques.
It’s just about making marketing more efficient.”
Even before the election, according to one former employee, Cambridge employees attended sessions about soliciting government business in the United States — where Mr. Trump now oversees the federal bureaucracy
and Mr. Bannon is arguably the White House’s most powerful staff member.
The technology — prominently featured in the firm’s sales materials and in media reports
that cast Cambridge as a master of the dark campaign arts — remains unproved, according to former employees and Republicans familiar with the firm’s work.