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Selling the American people

Advertising, Optimization, and the Origins of Adtech

This comprehensive open access book provides a deep-time perspective on the origins and evolution of data-driven digital advertising. Through a detailed historical analysis tracing back to the 1950s emergence of computerization, it examines how technical specialists in advertising and media progressively blended computation, quantitative methodologies, and calculative logics into a powerful ideology of marketing optimization and efficiency. The book offers crucial contextual understanding of how these enterprises of automated data collection, algorithmic targeting, and pursuit of measurable returns through management science techniques predated and ultimately helped establish the defining architectures and behavioral conditioning of today’s personalized programmatic advertising ecosystems.

Recommended for: Researchers, scholars, and students in media studies, communication, science and technology studies, and critical digital studies who are interested in understanding the historical roots and sociotechnical dynamics of digital advertising and the data-driven marketing industry. This book provides an in-depth, critical analysis of the origins and development of “adtech” – the infrastructure and ideologies that underpin the contemporary attention economy.

You will:

  • Gain a deeper understanding of how the advertising industry’s longstanding quest for optimization, efficiency, and data-driven decision-making shaped the emergence of digital advertising and surveillance capitalism.
  • Explore the key role played by technical experts, management science, and the computerization of advertising in transforming marketing practices and media ecosystems.
  • Learn about the historical continuities and transformations in the advertising industry’s efforts to “sell the American people” by leveraging new information technologies.
  • Develop critical perspectives on how the culture and calculative logics of adtech have come to mediate everyday encounters between people, products, and public spheres.
  • Engage with conceptual frameworks for unpacking the technical, institutional, and ideological underpinnings of data-driven marketing and its broader societal implications.
  • Be equipped to contribute to scholarly debates and public discussions on the political economy of digital media, surveillance capitalism, and the role of algorithms in shaping modern life.

Detailed Overview

A series of illuminating case studies explore how practitioners navigating at the intersection of data processing and managerial techniques came to dominate industry centers of power by advocating reengineering advertising through mathematical and technological means. The volume thus provides an indispensable foundation for comprehending modern “adtech” infrastructures by chronicling advertising’s formative adoption and refashioning of automation, data extraction, and targeted influence as strategic imperatives long predating widespread digital connectivity.

Citation and Licensing

McGuigan, L. (2023). Selling the American People: Advertising, Optimization, and the Origins of Adtech. The MIT Press. https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/5610/Selling-the-American-PeopleAdvertising. Open access under CC BY-NC-ND license. The license can be viewed here: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License .

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Selling the American people
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