[Bartweiss]

We can and do draw detailed psychographic categories with a few data points, but it's far from clear whether the results (and especially the details) are actually correct.

I think "since the 50s" should be taken as evidence against these models. Myers-Briggs first came into vogue in the late 1950s, and has been used for career counseling and hiring since despite being utterly unfit for purpose. Priming work dates to the 70s, and now it appears that many of the long-term uses advertising relies on don't replicate. The 'decoy effect' that drives many product strategies was formalized in the 1980s, and recent work suggests it exists only under very narrow conditions. Modern industry leaders like the Food and Brand Lab have apparently spent the last 20 years publishing absolute nonsense. Even results 'validated' with A/B testing are in many cases just noise from misusing statistics.

Precisely because we didn't have microtargeting or consumer-level feedback, all we've had since the 1950s is the belief that we can build and use these models. We know ads basically work, they improve brand recognition and reputation, but the Don Draper psychological rationales are essentially just-so stories written in the absence of data.

(As far as CA, no one seems to have dug up any seriously unusual patterns in 2016 voting. So unless they paired high-impact psychological targeting with an elaborate statistical coverup, what they actually did with the data wasn't exceptional.)