ABSTRACT

The most significant aspect of contemporary advertising, an industry that promises visibility and salience, is thoroughly hidden: the rise of programmatic. While experiments with Internet advertising date from the mid-1990s, the term ‘programmatic advertising’ has only been in use since around 2005. In 2017, programmatic eclipsed traditional advertising spend in the US. The rise of programmatic sits within the computerisation of all cultural activities, the growth of an algorithmic media infrastructure and the rise of the personal information economy. For advertisers, the benefits of programmatic are obvious: ad placement, based on a user’s browser history, is personalised to an unprecedented degree, theoretically reaching only those individuals most receptive to a marketing message at any given time; the cost of the ad, determined through real-time bidding, reflects market forces. Since advertisements appeared on Breitbart programmatically, Matt Rivitz suspected that most CEOs would balk at the knowledge that their brand appeared alongside politically fraught content.