Good morning. Will here. Today I look at Conservative Party plans to monetise its membership by sharing data with big brands.
Also: Ben Walker on why the polls may yet narrow come election time.
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Rishi Sunak has become deeply unpopular with the public, 71 per cent of whom hold an unfavourable view of the PM, taking his net favourability rating to a frosty minus 50. But what if he could get you a voucher code for JD Sports?
That appears to be the plan. The Conservative Party discussed monetising its members through a new app that would share user data with “brand partners”, according to reporting by Tom Burgis and Henry Dyer in the Guardian.
Senior Conservatives were reportedly interested in sharing the party’s database of more than 170,000 members with the developers of the planned “True Blue” app. A pitch deck leaked to the newspaper suggests that the party faithful could be monetised at a rate of £128.50 per person through a “Conservatives Marketplace”. The document suggests the party planned to make commissions on deals, with major brands such as Vodafone, Tesco, Amazon and British Gas its main source of income. (None of the brands mentioned have said they had any involvement in the app.)
My favourite part of the pitch deck is a kind of “Rishi Recommends” offer in which a cutout of the Prime Minister is put beside a 10 per cent discount on insurance. Perhaps this is what Sunak meant when he committed last year to “a wholly new kind of politics”: the kind of politics in which the highest office in the land is used to sell you cut-price merchandise.
A copyright message on the pitch deck appears to link it to a company called Addreax Group, which is owned by a Norwegian businessman and cryptocurrency investor called Christen Ager-Hanssen. Addreax’s website says the company uses an “AI Engine” to analyse people’s behaviour, and an “Eyeball Ecosystem” which “unleashes powerful Connectivity with eyeball engagement”, which sounds painful and frightening.
But even web3-powered, NFT-backed nonsense like this would not have been enough to make the Conservatives’ planned “Digital Railway” (honestly, that’s what it’s called) work, because Sunak is the wrong kind of politician. To really cash in on your fans, you have to be a true populist.
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