Selling the American People

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.Acknowledgments vii
I Dreams and Designs to Optimize Advertising
Introduction: A World Marketers Can Count On 3
1 AdTech Flows: Claims, Logistics, and Optimization in Digital Advertising 27
2 Advertising's Calculative Evolution 49
3 Optimization Takes Command I: Management Technique, from the Military to Madison Avenue 71
4 Optimization Takes Command II: The Rule of Calculation 101
II An Archaeology of Affordances
Interlude 131
5 How AdTech Got Its Spots: Computers, Automation, and the Roots of Programmatic Advertising 133
6 Addressing the American Person: Designs for Producing an Audience of One 165
7 Buy-Button Fantasies: The Persistence of Shoppability 193
8 Vive Le Roi! Accountability and the Pulling Power of Attribution 211
Conclusion 241
Notes 253
Index 317“A superbly researched history of the optimization of everyday life in the name of capitalist efficiency without regard to a media system fit for democracy. This outstanding book shows how our datafied societies arise not simply from technology disruptions but from efforts to shape the future in the interest of profit.”
—Robin Mansell, Professor Emerita, London School of Economics and Political Science
 
 
“Selling the American People is a major contribution to the political economy of communication and histories of optimization. McGuigan leaves us questioning the consequences of this decades long quest to better discriminate with data and computers.”
—Fenwick McKelvey, Associate Professor, Concordia University; author of Internet Daemons: Digital Communications PossessedLee 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.