Former Cambridge Analytica Exec Opens Agency

Cambridge Analytica's former Lead Psychologist Patrick Fagan has teamed up with former ad agency execs Dan Thwaites and James Cragg to launch an audience behavioural change business called Capuchin.

Fagan, who is an Associate Lecturer in Consumer Behaviour at Goldsmiths, University of London, spent eight months working for Cambridge Analytica, which was later found guilty of illegally harvesting data from more than 87 million Facebook profiles to target users with political ads. He previously worked for CrowdEmotion as Head of Emotion Sciences; The Web Psychologist as Head of Behavioural Research; and MountainView as Senior Behavioural Insights Associate.

Capuchin co-founder Cragg earlier served as MD of Tug, and held positions at Ogilvy and Jaguar Land Rover; while Thwaites worked previously as a senior strategist at agencies including Karmarama, Crayon, Iris and Tug. In a statement, the three said Capuchin will offer data and behavioural science to uncover underlying motivations; strategy to connect organisations with their human audiences; and commercial application to ensure incremental, measurable, scalable returns.

Fagan added: 'Humans are a wonderful combination of rational, irrational, logical and emotional, but natural human-to-human intuition doesn't automatically scale with marketing technology. We design empathy architecture, guiding organisations and their audiences in realising each other's value for hard commercial results'.

Web site: www.capuchin.cc .

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.