Alexander Waddington Oakes (born November 1968) is a British businessman, and the co-founder and an executive of Behavioural Dynamics Institute and SCL Group (formerly Strategic Communication Laboratories), the parent company of Cambridge Analytica and her sister AggregateIQ; the companies became known to a wider audience as a result of the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal involving the misuse of data.
From the early 1990s, Oakes' companies, operating under succession of names, were involved in influencing elections in developing countries, and with the onset of the War on Terror they were also contracted by the British military.
[1] In 2005, Oakes co-founded the London-based SCL Group (formerly Strategic Communication Laboratories), along with his older brother Nigel Oakes and Alexander Nix, described as a polo playboy whose father Paul David Ashburner Nix also became an investor in the company.
[2][3] In 2013, SCL established Cambridge Analytica, a subsidiary aiming to target the American elections market and led by fellow Old Etonian Alexander Nix, a director of SCL for 14 years.
[5] Cambridge Analytica claimed to use honey traps, bribery stings, and prostitutes, among other tactics, to influence more than 200 elections globally for its clients.