Part of my research is historical. In the 1980s, the Claritas Corporation was using geodemographics and psycho-demographics. In one sense, I think that one of two things can be true. Psycho-demographics can either be something relatively new—the point when you encounter it in the literature is the 1980s—or it's been a myth that the advertising industry has been trying to sell their products with for 30 years. I'm of the latter category.
I think it's a good way of selling their categories. I think that's where I actually have.... My opinion is that I'm not convinced it works. I'm not convinced that you need to collect all this information. I'm not convinced that psycho-demographics is really that effective. In particular, I also think that when you're looking at campaigns with limited resources, they're not writing ad copy for 500 different categories.
Now, there's a certain threat that AI might change that, but I think that for right now, if you tend to think this doesn't work and this probably isn't great, why are we enabling all this data to be collected? If you look at the literature, it says that three or four different variables are really good predictors of actual voter intent. I mean, beyond me, I think it's the question of why we are enabling all this other data collection if there's limited benefit to it.
I'm not against the idea that it might work; I'm skeptical of its overstated claims.