Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book shows how brands speak to and through diversity and considers the rewards that strategies deliver, the risks they entail. It explores how the advertising world has responded to 21st-century media, in terms of how media users are engaged, and their activities monitored and monetised. The book examines how citizen-consumers both experience and articulate active agency–and especially how they ‘speak back’ to what were opaque, impenetrable or distant sites of power. Since the mid-1990s, advertisers have had to negotiate the steady flow of audiences away from traditional legacy media towards online media platforms–the Internet, the World Wide Web, social networking sites and streaming services. In terms of how advertising manifests, at a time when audiences are free to swipe, scroll or linger in ways that appear autonomous, one development in particular warrants closer discussion: the rise of pro-grammatic advertising.