Did you watch the video? They claimed real results helping Ted Cruz in the primaries with this sort of hyper-targeted advertising.
The access they have to online data sources would absolutely be enough to start correlating things to build an individual profile. Say you can link someone's FB, Twitter, (HN?!) account posts, likes, shares, to credit card data, maybe even search keywords from shady advertisers, to vehicle registration records, tax records, census data, etc.
Do you really think this profiling is that far-fetched that they need to BS everyone? It doesn't have to be perfect to be many times more effective than untargeted ads...