An interactive curation of public data on the companies that make up the influence industry

Start exploring the companies

In this article, we will look in depth at the different advertising possibilities offered by Google and YouTube, how they are used by political campaigns and what exactly consultants and agencies might be asked to do by a candidate or party.

Google Ads in Election Campaigns

In this visual essay, we use Donald Trump’s 2020 US presidential campaign as a case study to define the basic scope of the influence industry. To do this, we look into spending on data-driven influence services found in the Federal Election Commission’s spending database. As we follow the money, we also uncover information about the companies that played an influencing role in Trump’s 2020 campaign.

The Industry Behind Your Vote: A Visual Essay

Consultant Brad Parscale develops Donald Trump's social media campaigns in 2016 and 2020, Experian is a data broker that sold data to political parties in the UK and Brazil, uCampaign make political apps across the world. These few examples are only a small fraction of hundreds of companies that are part of a wider industry working behind the scenes of our political opinions.

Investigating the Companies Behind our Political Opinions

Few companies from within the Influence Industry have broken out of professional circles and given themselves reason to capture the public imagination as Cambridge Analytica. We use the FEC spending database in the US to look beyond the headlines to investigate a wider and deeper scope of this companies activites in the 2016 US elections.

Follow The Money: Cambridge Analytica and US election spending database

The Influence Industry Explorer exhibits the myriad companies working in political influence across the world. In this article you can find a glossary of the data we’ve included and sources we used.

The Explorer Explainer

In the Influence Industry Explorer, we present findings from our research into 500 companies operating in the business of political influence. You can either explore the companies through our interactive and open database or scroll down to read our case studies which provide insight into specific companies, our research methodology, and the course of our investigation.

In the process of researching and documenting how the Influence
Industry operates in different political contexts around the world, our
project and our partners examined over 500 companies that play a role in this
wider ecosystem — from global data brokers to local campaign consultancies. 

The Influence Industry Case Studies

The Influence Industry Explorer

In this article, we will look in depth at the different advertising
possibilities offered by Google and YouTube, how they are used by political
campaigns and what exactly consultants and agencies might be asked to do by a
candidate or party.

In this article, we will look in depth at the different
advertising possibilities offered by Google and YouTube, how they are used by
political campaigns and what exactly consultants and agencies might be asked
to do by a candidate or party.

According to the FEC’s spending database, during the 2020 US presidential election, the Donald J. Trump campaign spent about 65% of their overall finances on companies and services that can be considered to be part of the influence industry – private firms who support the public communications of political campaigns. According to the data, these services were provided by 52 different companies. Most of the money spent is registered against vague line items such as “general consulting” and “digital advertising services”. Almost half of the companies lack sufficient public information online for full transparency and accountability, and most of those are largely unknown to citizens. 
In this visual essay, we use the Donald Trump 2020 presidential campaign as a case study to define a basic scope of the influence industry.
<TextBox text="Find the visual essay here: <a href='https://sihangsun.github.io/influence_industry/'>https://sihangsun.github.io/influence_industry/</a> " />
<h2>Methodology</h2>
Almost no company brands itself as part of the influence industry, which makes identifying the companies difficult. Due to its shifting and dynamic nature, it's also hard to completely tie the industry to a few specific fields. We cannot, therefore, directly investigate all the companies that worked for a political campaign, but we can use a set of proxy terms – described below – to identify noteworthy and relevant firms in one of the few public databases of spending during elections. 
We considered companies to be relevant to the influence industry if the spending data from the FEC shows that they provided data-driven influence services to a campaign. We classified spending on such services into three categories: “Data,” “Digital Advertising,” and “Consulting.” We developed a glossary of all the service terms related to the three categories from the data set and used it to screen out all the influence industry companies that worked for Trump's campaign.
<ImageResponsive viewWidth={true} big="https://cdn.ttc.io/s/the-influence-industry-project/explorer_img/tiip-explorer-sun-casestudy-2.png" small="https://cdn.ttc.io/s/the-influence-industry-project/explorer_img/tiip-explorer-sun-casestudy-2-small.png" alt="Image showing companies represented by dots grouped in a larger circle showing influence industry expenditure and the company dots are differently colored based on the researchers classification of company" caption="Click here to learn more about this method in the Data and Methods page of the project: <a href='https://sihangsun.github.io/influence_industry/method.html'> https://sihangsun.github.io/influence_industry/method.html</>" />
Using this method, we were able to identify more than 800 transactions made to 52 different companies by Trump's 2020 campaign. The total amount of these services is $503,477,192, which accounts for about 65% of the overall campaign spending. 
<h2>Summary of Findings</h2>
Most of Trump's spending on influence companies seems to go through somewhat opaque channels. The most explicit channel – transactions with the keyword "DATA" – only represents 0.15% of all the spending. However, much more money was spent through "Consulting" and "Digital Advertising" channels. Trump spent about $9 million on consulting services that may involve the use of data, but still only accounted for about 1% of all spending. A whopping $493 million was spent on digital advertising by the Trump campaign. The amount represents 64% of all campaign spending.
Notably, rather than working with many companies, there were only four exclusive companies that received money from the Trump 2020 campaign committee for services related to digital advertising. 
The four companies are:
<ul>
<li>American Made Media Consultants LLC</li>
<li>Tmone, LLC</li>
<li>Legendary Campaigns</li>
<li>Datapier </li>
</ul>
In addition to the opaqueness of the spending channels, some of the companies are less transparent and even stay invisible to the public. 
For example, one company we identified called <a href="https://influenceindustry.org/en/explorer/companies/american-made-media/">American Made Media Consultants LLC</a>, received almost $500 million from the Trump campaign for digital adverting related services. This company has very little public information available online, and most information is only available due to journalistic accounts. In fact, 24 of the 52 influence companies we identified from Trump's 2020 campaign spending do not have official websites. A lack of transparency makes it hard for them to be held accountable. 
Use the interactive visualization tool in the last part of the project to learn more about the companies that played a role influencing voters in Trump's 2020 campaign and to further research and investigate the influence industry through those companies.
Find the interactive visualization tool here: <a href="https://sihangsun.github.io/influence_industry/">https://sihangsun.github.io/influence_industry/</a>
The influence industry is led since 2016 by Tactical Tech’s Data and Politics team addressing the pervasive data-driven technologies used by political groups within elections and political campaigns.
Sihang Sun is a student at Northeastern University pursuing a master's degree in Information Design and Data Visualization. He is particularly interested in storytelling through data visualization. He is exploring an interdisciplinary method to make sense of enormous amounts of data and better communicate the findings with skills in data analysis, design, communication, and coding. See more of his work at: <a href="https://sihangsun.myportfolio.com/">sihangsun.myportfolio.com</a>.

In this visual essay, we use Donald Trump’s 2020 US presidential
campaign as a case study to define a basic scope of the influence industry. To
do this, we look into spending on data-driven influence services found in the
Federal Election Commission’s spending database. As we follow the money, we
also uncover information about the companies that played an influencing role
in Trump’s 2020 campaign. 

In this visual essay, we use Donald Trump’s 2020 US
presidential campaign as a case study to define the basic scope of the
influence industry. To do this, we look into spending on data-driven influence
services found in the Federal Election Commission’s spending database. As we
follow the money, we also uncover information about the companies that played
an influencing role in Trump’s 2020 campaign. 

Third parties have been involved in political communication and our election processes <a href="https://influenceindustry.org/en/learn/resources/history-data-campaigns/">for over a century</a>. However, the increasing availability of data-driven processes has been accompanied by a reliance on private firms. Some firms provide expertise in managing and controlling data hosting and analysis technologies while other consultants or agencies advise campaigns on what technologies to use when, and how to use them effectively within their campaigns.
When Tactical Tech started our research on this topic, media coverage only named a handful of companies. We began by combing the existing reporting and the primary sources or self-published information from companies’ websites, social media, and company information platforms such as Crunchbase. We began to <a href="https://influenceindustry.org/en/learn/resources/data-as-different-methods/">document the variety of types of work the organisations did</a>, from companies such as Aristotle, a data broker firm boasting <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2007/12/aristotle200712">a unique list of detailed data on 175 million American voters</a>, to app builders such as uCampaign and campaign technologists such as Liegey Muller Pons, who were described as "Tinder for elections"<a href="#sdfootnote1sym"></a><F>Siraud, M. 2016. La start-up qui veut booster la candidature de Macron. <a href="https://www.lefigaro.fr/politique/2016/06/22/01002-20160622ARTFIG00184-liegey-muller-pons-la-start-up-qui-veut-moderniser-les-campagnes-electorales.php">https://www.lefigaro.fr/politique/2016/06/22/01002-20160622ARTFIG00184-liegey-muller-pons-la-start-up-qui-veut-moderniser-les-campagnes-electorales.php</a></F>. Alongside them, we found advisers and strategists such as 270 Strategies, run by a consultant who had successfully worked on the Obama 2012 campaign, and companies like Modak Analytics, an Indian company that combines identities from people’s different accounts for advertisers.
We also discovered that many of these third-party entities worked in multiple countries, such as the data broker Experian or the consultancy BuzzMaker. A few organisations were built on the back of a single exemplary political consultant, such as Jim Messina’s The Messina Group, or Vincent Harris’s Harris Media. Some, such as NationBuilder, were actively non-partisan, but others, such as Blue State Digital, only work for progressive causes.
<ImageResponsive viewWidth={true} big="https://cdn.ttc.io/s/the-influence-industry-project/explorer_img/tiip-explorer-casestudy1_0_large.png" small="https://cdn.ttc.io/s/the-influence-industry-project/explorer_img/tiip-explorer-casestudy1_0_small.png" alt="Visual showing various connections of a company's dossier" />
This was the first evidence we had that the industry using personal data to influence political outcomes was far larger and the practices more widespread than we thought. Some companies actively publicised their work with political groups giving details about which parties their worked with on their websites or the impact they have for voters; for others, public information about their work was very limited with either single page websites with only a contact form, or at times not website at all. 
In March 2018, our research took a turn as the industry became both at once more public and yet more opaque. The <a href="https://influenceindustry.org/en/explorer/case-studies/cambridge-analytica/">Cambridge Analytica scandal</a> revealed that personal data from millions of Facebook users was being leveraged to influence electoral outcomes. The media coverage and subsequent legal investigations into both Cambridge Analytica and Facebook’s role in politics reinforced the importance of investigating data-led companies working with political groups. As the founder of Cambridge Analytica himself asserted, “What we are doing is no different from what the advertising industry at large is doing across the commercial space.”<a href="#sdfootnote1sym"></a><F>Oral Evidence - Fake News - 27 Feb 2018, accessed 12 March 2019, <a href="https://data.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/committeeevidence.svc/evidencedocument/digital-culture-media-andsport-committee/fake-news/oral/79388.html">https://data.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/committeeevidence.svc/evidencedocument/digital-culture-media-andsport-committee/fake-news/oral/79388.html</a></F> . 
<BigText text="We wanted to go beyond the story of this one specific scandal and find the wider – and more routine – involvement of these companies in political campaigns." />
With news of the scandal so wide-reaching, we managed to secure interviews with some CEOs who were initially keen to show how their companies’ practices were different to the underhanded work of Cambridge Analytica. However, most companies became increasingly more guarded, removing information that exposed their links to political groups from their websites. In order to continue to add to our map of the Influence Industry, we relied on <a href="https://web.archive.org/">The Wayback Machine</a> to find old versions of websites and saved screenshots from any current websites we did reference, in case the information was taken down.
Through word of mouth, news stories, and links within the websites of the companies, our map of the industry expanded. Keeping track of every company we came across became our priority over profiling every company’s work and background. At this point, our research question shifted: can we create a comprehensive list of companies in the industry?
<ImageResponsive viewWidth={true} big="https://cdn.ttc.io/s/the-influence-industry-project/explorer_img/tiip-explorer-casestudy1_1_large.png" small="https://cdn.ttc.io/s/the-influence-industry-project/explorer_img/tiip-explorer-casestudy1_1_small.png" alt="Visual showing our research increasing from 3 to 70 and 500 companies" />
To begin compiling this list, we added companies from industry sources that had arisen during the first stages of our research, such as the <a href="https://campaignsandelections.com/awards/">Campaigns and Elections Awards</a> and <a href="https://campaignsandelections.com/consultant-directory/">their political directory</a>. We found others through our partners’ <a href="https://influenceindustry.org/en/resources/themes/countries-regions/">investigative research and case studies</a> about the role of data in elections in countries across the world. These reports exposed not only the operations of large US-based companies in countries such as Brazil and India, but also how companies within those countries can wield different kinds of data-driven influence depending on the level of legal oversight.
The list was not only exponentially growing, but we were also encountering problems relating to how the businesses changed. Some companies shut down, such as Federavox, who responded to our questions by saying that they only operated during an election period.<a href="#sdfootnote1sym"></a><F>Federavox representative, 2019, Interview with Amber Macintyre and Varoon Bashyakarla, Tactical Tech</F> In other cases, we found companies that were subsidiaries or parent companies to others, such as Alchemy Social, who are owned by Experian. Some of these take-overs of smaller companies happened during the course of our research and the changes were so constant that the sense of a vast industry was becoming apparent. 
The industry is a living, changing system of businesses that is so diverse and complex, with so many different business models within it, that it may be able to escape accountability. If we limited our focus to one or two companies, others would appear in their place or be acquired by another organisation. Reaching 500 companies, we decided it was time to publish this comprehensive <a href="https://ourdataourselves.tacticaltech.org/posts/the-influence-industry-long-list/">‘snapshot’ of the industry.</a> While continuing to keep an eye on the new companies constantly appearing on the scene, we have paused updating our long list and are returning to our original questions about this industry – what work do they carry out, who is behind them, what methods do they use and what impact do they have on our politic landscape?
With the forthcoming Influence Industry Explorer we hope to provide a baseline of information on the private companies working in political influence. The research found in the Explorer serves as a baseline for election monitoring or investigations into political processes and industry involvement. The Explorer provides elements of our methodologies, case studies of companies and regions, and original data that aims to encourage connections and investigations to dig deeper into the unknowns of the industry in order to bring more transparency to the influence industry.
Author: Amber Macintyre, 29th August 2022
With support from: Christy Lange

There is an industry of private companies mediating our political
environment. Data brokers are choosing what political parties know about us;
tech companies are analysing our data to make political profiles based on our
potential for political support; and campaign consultants are deciding which
messages we receive and where we see them. While transparency is lauded as an
important aspect of our political systems, most formal mechanisms focus on
elected political officials. Consequently, little is known about these
companies, the details of the type of work they do or their political agendas.
Our research begins by documenting 500 of the companies in the industry.

There is an industry of private companies mediating our
political environment. Data brokers are choosing what political parties know
about us; tech companies are analysing our data to make political profiles
based on our potential for political support; and campaign consultants are
deciding which messages we receive and where we see them. While transparency
is lauded as an important aspect of our political systems, most formal
mechanisms focus on elected political officials. Consequently, little is known
about these companies, the details of the type of work they do or their
political agendas. Our research begins by documenting 500 of the companies in
the industry.

Cambridge Analytica continues to be the go-to story to describe the state of the influence industry. Despite being involved in scandals that took place over four years ago, the firm remains a useful and popular starting point for understanding what we can and can't know about the involvement of private firms in political influence. In 2018, Cambridge Analytica made headlines worldwide after a whistleblower worked with investigators to unveil the company’s highly questionable strategies including a deceitful use of Facebook data from unconsenting users, its involvement in the controversial Brexit campaign during the UK referendum to leave the European Union, and its combination of psychometric profiling and digital microtargeting of the US electorate for the Donald J. Trump campaign in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election. <F>The Cambridge Analytica Files, Carole Cadwalladr et al., The Guardian, 2017 - 2018, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/news/series/cambridge-analytica-files">https://www.theguardian.com/news/series/cambridge-analytica-files</a></F>
Cambridge Analytica was able to operate on behalf of some of the highest-profile political campaigns, without their methods being questioned publicly. The fact that their tactics were only revealed thanks to an internal whistleblower and a journalistic investigation indicates the lack of scrutiny of the digital campaign industry’s methods and the opacity of those methods to the wider public. 
<ImageResponsive viewWidth={true} big="https://cdn.ttc.io/s/the-influence-industry-project/explorer_img/tiip-explorer-casestudy2_2_large.png" small="https://cdn.ttc.io/s/the-influence-industry-project/explorer_img/tiip-explorer-casestudy2_2_os.png" alt="Visual showing Cambridge Analytica receiving a sum of US$16,098,994 from Republican committees" />
Around 60% of countries worldwide have legislation that says that a party must report their election expenses and in some cases those financial reports must be made public.<F>International IDEA. (n.d.) Political Finance: Design Tool, <a href="https://www.idea.int/political-finance-design-tool.">https://www.idea.int/political-finance-design-tool.</a></F>. However, the data available can be difficult to access, and, if it is accessible, it may lack substantial detail. 
<BigText text="One of the richest sources of data on US elections is the Federal Election Commission’s (FEC) Database."/>
The United States Federal Election Commission (FEC) maintains records of campaign finance in the US. The database provides up-to-date and detailed data on spending and donations. The database is publicly accessible through downloadable files (CSVs—files that separate data by commas and can easily be viewed in a spreadsheet or table format) or with an API—an interface that allows someone to use a computer to access the data.<F>How to Research Public Records, Federal Election Commission, <a href="https://www.fec.gov/introduction-campaign-finance/how-to-research-public-records/">https://www.fec.gov/introduction-campaign-finance/how-to-research-public-records/</a></F>
The comprehensive detail in the FEC database makes it a good starting point for researching Cambridge Analytica. In particular, we used three files - one which describes the candidates, another which describes the candidate's relationship to committees, and finally one that describes the spending from committees on suppliers. All spending in elections in the US is done through committees, and so to understand the spending on a candidate we first looked at which committees had paid invoices to Cambridge Analytica and then at the relationship between that committee and any candidate they support. The records indicate a broader impact that the company had on the 2016 elections than just the reported involvement with Donald Trump’s campaign.
The filings reveal that across the full 2016 election cycle, the company invoiced a total of US$16,098,994.81 from committees. According to the database, Cambridge Analytica worked exclusively with the Republican Party or Republican Party-orientated campaigns. The firm worked with committees affiliated with the Republican Party in the categories of Presidential, Senate, House, Political Action Committee (PAC) and Super Political Action Committee elections. 
<ImageResponsive viewWidth={true} big="https://cdn.ttc.io/s/the-influence-industry-project/explorer_img/tiip_explorer_case1_2.png" small="https://cdn.ttc.io/s/the-influence-industry-project/explorer_img/tiip_explorer_case1_2small.png" alt="yellow words on turquoise background Cambridge Analytica worked for many Republicans in House, Presidential, Senate, PAC, Super PACs but no Democrats" caption="The image shows the different Republican committees Cambridge Analytica worked for and demonstrates that no Democrat committees paid Cambridge Analytica."/>
The two largest contributors to this total were Donald J. Trump President, Inc. with $5,912,500 followed very closely by Ted Cruz's Cruz for President with $5,805,552 and the Super PAC named Make America Number 1 in third with $1,462,809. 
The campaign spending filings describe some of the services and technologies Cambridge Analytica provided to its clients. The Donald J. Trump President, Inc. campaign was the least transparent, describing nearly $6,000,000.00 worth of work using only one title: "Data Management Services."
Across all campaigns, according to the records, Cambridge Analytica also provided "Micro-targeting survey research," "Data Services," "Campaign Consulting," and "Web Services" to various clients. Without more detail under these categories, it is difficult to know specifically what services Cambridge Analytica was providing—what methods they used, which techniques they employed, or whom they targeted with them. 
<ImageResponsive viewWidth={true} big="https://cdn.ttc.io/s/the-influence-industry-project/explorer_img/tiip-explorer-casestudy1_4.svg" small="https://cdn.ttc.io/s/the-influence-industry-project/explorer_img/tiip-explorer-casestudy1_4_small.svg" alt="list of services next to an old computer" caption="The image shows the different services associated with Cambridge Analytica invoices according to the FEC database"/>
The FEC database shows us the wide impact of Cambridge Analytica beyond the headlines. The firm earned a significant amount of money from various Republican groups and by providing a diverse set of vaguely-defined services. The exploration of the filings also shows us the partisan nature of at least some of the digital consulting industry, which prompts us to ask: how many companies are partisan and what does that mean for regulating the industry? 
Even in a country with one of the most detailed government-enforced transparency systems, it still required a whistleblower to uncover the true nature of Cambridge Analytica's work. This is just one reason why we must turn to other research methods including interviews, content analysis of advertising, and visual identities of companies amongst others to gain a deeper understanding of the influence industry.
Authors: Gary Wright, 29th August 2022
With support from: Patrick Harvey, Amber Macintyre, and Christy Lange

An exploration of the Influence Industry—the wide array of data
consultants, digital strategists, technology vendors and digital communication
service providers—would not be complete without a mention of the most infamous
name in the industry, Cambridge Analytica.

Cambridge Analytica had a much wider involvement in the 2016
US elections than their work for Donald Trump's Presidential campaign. Using
the Federal Election Commission database, our research establishes Cambridge
Analytica as a partisan company, earning a total of US$16,098,994 from
Republican committees across the Presidential, Senate and House elections.

Follow The Money: Cambridge Analytica and the US election spending database

<a href="influenceindustry.org/en/explorer/">The Explorer</a> is an investigators’ tool that provides access to a unique and open collection of data on the companies working in political influence. The data includes details of over 30 countries the companies have worked in, dates they’ve worked, financial data from the UK and US electoral finance transparency systems, and links to the companies and our public sources. The tool is a first-of-its-kind resource for journalists, researchers, election oversight groups, and any others who are monitoring and investigating political influence.
The Explorer allows you to:
<ol>
<li>explore the data Tactical Tech has collected including the countries the companies have worked in, the dates they’ve worked in the industry and the type of work they carry out</li>
<li>visit the links to their websites, company database information, or to sources evidencing their work in politics</li>
<li>download the data so you can play with it and add to it yourself.</li>
</ol>
We have robustly checked the data through double- (and triple-) coding, however, due to the opaque and ever shifting nature of the industry, there is always new information or newly outdated links. We appreciate anyone getting in touch with us if they see something that should be reflected differently or if they have new information, or if you’d like to add to our data, or submit a proposal for a case study based on the data. 
Send an email to ttc @ tacticaltech.org with the subject line ‘Explorer Data’.
<h3>Glossary of the Influence Industry Explorer</h3>
Below are descriptions of the different elements of The Explorer.
Name and alternative names of companies
This is the formal name of the organisation. We also recorded any other known names they operate under or are associated with through their business, such as other trademarks, parent companies, or previous company names.
Description
The description currently includes
a) a summary of the type of work they do
b) the industries they work with
c) and, where relevant, any notes on the company status, such as if they have dissolved or are now owned by another company.
Website
In cases where the company has a live website, we provide a link to this website. In cases where their website is not available (which may be because they don’t have one or the link is no longer working), we link to their LinkedIn or social media. If none of these are available, we link to the closest we can find to a company summary, such as their profile on the UK company house website or Crunchbase. In some cases, there are no descriptive overview pages available, in which case all information about the company can be found under ‘evidence’.
Open Corporates ID and OCCRP Aleph ID
Here we link to the OpenCorporates and/or the OCCRP company databases where you can find an overview of their business registration information.
The Evidence
The evidence of their work with political parties currently covers:
<ul>
<li>The country or region they work in</li>
<li>The dates they have worked in political campaigning</li>
<li>The type of work they do</li>
</ul>
Country and Region
We record the country that they have been observed to work in. However, the regions were harder to define, and we only described the region as the company or source had themselves – e.g. we record that a company works in Europe only if they also name this region on their website or in another case, we code that they work internationally if the company have written the word ‘international’ explicitly on their website.
Dates of Work
The dates of work are either
<ul>
<li>a specific year in which we know they worked for an election campaign or</li>
<li>a range with a start year and end year (including the present day) in which the company has stated they work in political elections</li>
</ul>
Category of Work
We have used categories defined by our previous research defined as Intelligence, Asset, Influence or Miscellaneous (link). Many companies engage with more than one of these types of work.
<ul>
<li>Data as an asset: These companies engage with collecting and hosting data from various places including collating database records, polling, ‘social listening’ and buying and selling this personal data.</li>
<li>Data as intelligence: These companies carry out analytics, metrics, profiling, and segmentation, as well as hosting data on databases such as customer relationship management systems.</li>
<li>Data as influence: These companies support the campaign and communication from strategy to design, to ad placement and outreach and keywords include mobilisation, public affairs, marketing, advertising, and fundraising.</li>
<li>Miscellaneous: While we are only interested in companies carrying out work in one or more of the categories above, some of the companies were found in the UK or US financial spending databases (described further below) conducting work that could not be covered by these categories such as travel expenses or human resources. In these cases, we use the category miscellaneous.</li>
</ul>
The Sources
This evidence comes from three different categories of sources:
<ul>
<li>Primary sources: a company’s own promotional materials such as its websites or social media pages</li>
<li>Secondary sources: a different source from the company itself including media coverage, company databases, or research publications</li>
<li>Financial election databases: data from the UK and US public election finance databases.</li>
</ul>
Primary Sources: Self-Published Content
This evidence is provided by the company itself. It is primarily found on their website, but in may also come from their social media channels or other spaces they can publish information about themselves. We have usually used a link to the source from the WayBackMachine.
Secondary Sources: Journalism and other data sources
This evidence is provided by any other sources, including external newspapers, academic publications, or online publications. While we try to link only to reliable secondary sources, we cannot always verify the accuracy of these sources.
Financial Election Databases
The UK and the US have two publicly accessible and detailed election spending and donation monitoring systems. From which we downloaded the following (last updated - October 6th):
UK Electoral Commission (all data under ‘spending’): <a href="http://search.electoralcommission.org.uk/">http://search.electoralcommission.org.uk/</a>
US Federal Electoral Commission (operating expenditures 2020-2022): <a href="https://www.fec.gov/data/browse-data/?tab=bulk-data">https://www.fec.gov/data/browse-data/?tab=bulk-data</a>
To use the downloaded data we first ‘normalised’ all the names by making them all lowercase and removing any references to the business such as ‘ltd’ or ‘limited. We then scanned for all matches that start with the names and alternative names we identified of the companies.
Secondly, we matched the categories provided by the electoral finance systems to our four categories. In the case of the UK, there are 9 categories set by the electoral management body, and in the case of the US, these categories are input by the party themselves – in which case there were over 13,000 different categories. We mapped these categories by setting keywords to map to our four categories.
Some examples of how we’ve mapped are below, if you’d like the full set, please get in touch.
INTELLIGENCE = ['testing', 'optimization', 'targeting']
INFLUENCE = ['ads', 'advert', 'email', 'fundraising', 'facebook', 'media', 'robocall', 'pamphlet',]
ASSET = ['list', 'acquisition', 'data', 'research', 'voter file']
MISCELLANEOUS = ['catering', 'travel', 'room rental']
When mapping the US data in the case of no category, we used the ‘purpose’ column, mapped with the same words. Finally, if there were no category or purpose, we’d tag the data as miscellaneous.
Case Studies
Finally, you can also explore highlighted key stories within the data and our methodologies of research through our case studies, available on the landing page of the explorer.
We appreciate anyone getting in touch with us if they see something that should be reflected differently or if they have new information, or if you’d like to add to our data, or submit a proposal for a case study based on the data. 
Send an email to ttc @ tacticaltech.org with the subject line ‘Explorer Data’.
Credits
Project and Research Lead: Amber Macintyre
Project Design: Ralph Delfs and Marcus Theisen, <a href="https://sinnwerkstatt.com/">Sinnwerkstatt</a>
Data Research: Patrick Harvey, Cassie Cladis, Emma Neibig
Project input from: Christy Lange, Gary Wright, Laurent Dellere, Marek Tuszynski, Yiorgos Bagakis

The Influence Industry Explorer exhibits the myriad of companies
working in political influence across the world. Within The Explorer you can
find company details, when they’ve worked with political groups, and where
they’ve worked as well as links to their websites, company information, and
the sources for the data.  

The Influence Industry Explorer exhibits the myriad of
companies working in political influence across the world. Using The Explorer,
you can find details about when and where they’ve worked with political
groups, as well as links to their websites, company information, and public
sources.  In this article you will find a glossary of the data we’ve included
and sources we used.