Selling the American people : advertising, optimization, and the origins of Adtech / Lee McGuigan.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

McGuigan, Lee, 1986- author.

Series:

Distribution matters

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Internet advertising--United States.

Internet advertising.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (304 pages).

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, MA : The MIT Press, 2023

Summary:

How marketers learned to dream of optimization and speak in the idiom of management science well before the widespread use of the Internet. Algorithms, data extraction, digital marketers monetizing "eyeballs": these all seem like such recent features of our lives. And yet, Lee McGuigan tells us in this eye-opening book, digital advertising was well underway before the widespread use of the Internet. Explaining how marketers have brandished the tools of automation and management science to exploit new profit opportunities, Selling the American People traces data-driven surveillance all the way back to the 1950s, when the computerization of the advertising business began to blend science, technology, and calculative cultures in an ideology of optimization. With that ideology came adtech , a major infrastructure of digital capitalism. To help make sense of today's attention merchants and choice architects, McGuigan explores a few key questions: How did technical experts working at the intersection of data processing and management sciences come to command the center of gravity in the advertising and media industries How did their ambition to remake marketing through mathematical optimization shape and reflect developments in digital technology In short, where did adtech come from, and how did data-driven marketing come to mediate the daily encounters of people, products, and public spheres His answers show how the advertising industry's efforts to bend information technologies toward its dream of efficiency and rational management helped to make "surveillance capitalism" one of the defining experiences of public life.

Contents:

Intro

Series Page

Title Page

Copyright

Contents

Acknowledgments

I: Dreams and Designs to Optimize Advertising

Introduction: A World Marketers Can Count on

1. Adtech Flows: Claims, Logistics, and Optimization in Digital Advertising

2. Advertising’s Calculative Evolution

3. Optimization Takes Command I: Management Technique, from the Military to Madison Avenue

4. Optimization Takes Command II: The Rule of Calculation

II: An Archaeology of Affordances

Interlude

5. How Adtech Got Its Spots: Computers, Automation, and the Roots of Programmatic Advertising

6. Addressing the American Person: Designs for Producing an Audience of One

7. Buy-Button Fantasies: The Persistence of Shoppability

8. Vive Le Roi! Accountability and the Pulling Power of Attribution

Conclusion

Index.

Notes:

OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.

ISBN:

0-262-37423-4

0-262-37424-2

OCLC:

1353637583