Inside Digital Advertising: Platforms, Power, and Material Politics

Dozens of times daily, access to your screen is auctioned to advertisers, sometimes by your own phone or laptop without your knowledge. In the background are huge, electricity-hungry, carbon-emitting systems that conduct roughly two trillion near-instantaneous, automated auctions every day.

This book takes you into the heart of this mysterious world. It describes how Google built its astonishing global system of warehouse-scale computing and turned that system into an unprecedented, multibillion-dollar, money-earning machine, and how Facebook – almost by accident – also became an advertising leviathan. It examines the tensions between those giants and the smaller firms that populate digital advertising’s open marketplace. Those tensions, as well as conflicts over user privacy, give rise to a new kind of politics that plays out in material systems in the form of crucial clashes between different ways of designing those systems. Building on work in the emerging interdisciplinary field of market studies, MacKenzie and Caliskan examine digital advertising’s material politics, its giant megamachines, and the foundations of platform power.

Inside Digital Advertising lays bare the processes that underpin today’s global advertising industry. It will be a key book for students and academics in the social sciences, humanities, and business studies, and it will appeal to anyone interested in the forces that are shaping our everyday digital world.