The post-mortems begin — for Cruz and “Big Data”.

I believe Trump ran a better campaign than Cruz for two reasons:
1) Republican voters not only wanted an outsider candidate for president, they wanted that candidate to campaign like an outsider
2) The conventional strategies and tactics on running in the presidential primary had become so stale that an outsider with disdain for professional politics found a new way to win using common sense
Trump’s simple, straightforward strategy of trying to win in every state, take as much free media as possible, have an inclusion attitude toward getting voters, and appear in front of as many people as possible proved to be sledgehammer against the old way. And unlike just about every other past self-funder, Trump did not let his campaign take him for a ride.
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A final word about data-driven advertising: in the rush to be Internet savvy, I believe campaigns have overlooked how impractical it is to get a message across there. Because of the size constraint mobile is not conducive toward intrusive content like ads, and display advertising is incredibly ignorable and otherwise threatened by ad-blocking technology. While Twitter and other social media sites are effective for voter contact and media relations, the advertising on them is by definition a much weaker product than what you see on TV. Internet advertising is another space where campaigns seem to drift because it looks smart.

The size-constrained mobile is not conducive to content in general. Smartphones are wrecking the internet.