How institutional pressures influence corporate data-driven communication

In 2018, Cambridge Analytica dominated news headlines. They harvested big data from the profiles of more than 87 million Facebook users (Hern, 2018), mapped their personality traits based on their likes and used that information to target them with 5.9 million visual ads (Poulsen, 2018) in the ‘2016 Donald J. Trump for President of the United States’ campaign. Algorithms were developed to combine data from Facebook with other sources to create a superior dataset that contained hundreds of individual properties for each person which were used to construct messages and target people with highly personalised advertising. Cambridge Analytica may have influenced the outcome of the 2016 US presidential election (Cadwalladr & Graham-Harrison, 2018). However, many communication professionals are not aware of the importance of big data and academics argue that communicators need to be conscious of the opportunities and challenges that working with big data will bring to organisations (Holtzhausen, 2016; Wiencierz, 2019; Wiesenberg, Zerfass, & Moreno, 2017). Despite the generally accepted importance of big data in corporate communication, academic research has mostly ignored its potential and challenges (Wiencierz, 2019; Wiencierz & Röttger, 2017; Wiesenberg et al., 2017).