Selling the American People: Advertising, Optimization, and the Origins of Adtech
(Paperback)
Publishing Details
Selling the American People: Advertising, Optimization, and the Origins of Adtech
By (Author) Lee Mcguigan
MIT Press Ltd
MIT Press
22nd August 2023
United States
Classifications
General
Non Fiction
E-commerce: business aspects
Online marketing / Social media marketing
Impact of science and technology on society
658.872
Physical Properties
Paperback
352
Width 152mm, Height 229mm
Description
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.
Author Bio
Lee McGuigan is Assistant Professor in the Hussman School of Journalism and Media at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and an associate at Cornell Tech's Digital Life Initiative. He is a coeditor of The Audience Commodity in a Digital Age.
