Online Advertising: Data, Materiality, Systematicity and Power

In the first half of 2019, advertisers spent $57.9 bn on online advertising in the US and £7.3 bn in the UK (IAB 2019a&b). Traditional advertising - especially print, already in eclipse - has been hit hard by the coronavirus crisis, but online advertising, particularly on the top platforms, much less so (Barker 2020). It is expected to continue to grow, especially if the shift to e-commerce is permanent, and revenues from it finance much of the everyday digital world (search, social media, email services, apps, etc) as well as, eg, crucial outlets for serious journalism. Online's share of political advertising, negligible a decade ago, rose in the UK to 23.9% in 2015 and 42.8% in 2017 (Electoral Commission 2018: 4). Yet surprisingly little research in science and technology studies, sociology or politics has focused in any depth on the practices of online advertising.

We will examine how online advertising has developed from simple 'renting' of space on websites to today's 'real-time bidding'. Many millions of times a day, the momentary opportunity to show an advertisement to a specific individual user triggers an instantaneous automated auction, with bidding algorithms being provided with, eg, details of the user's device and location, and often a 'cookie' (a text file previously deposited in the user's browser) or other identifier, which can be linked to data such as the user's age band, gender, interests and browsing history (including uncompleted purchases and perhaps even mouse 'hovers').

We will research how data is generated (not just by the now-familiar 'cookies', but by less well-known techniques such as 'pixels': tiny invisible images downloaded by users' devices) and how it is used to 'target' ads, inform automated bidding, and measure advertising's success. We will examine how and why advertising technology takes the material forms that it does, including the effects of material constraints such as the need to bid in online auctions within around a tenth of a second, and investigate the relationship of advertising's materiality to diverse forms of power and politics, such as the 'market power' of the field's giants such as Google and Facebook, the impact of the politics and law of privacy (eg the EU's General Data Protection Regulation or GDPR), and the 'material politics' of the choices among ways of configuring crucial technical systems.

Our research will combine investigation of current practices and debates with examination of the historical processes of their emergence (including the migration of the techniques of digital advertising into electoral politics and political campaigning). Preparatory fieldwork has given us the contacts to conduct audio/video interviewing until coronavirus risk has been minimized sufficiently to permit face-to-face interviews and observational ethnography (in relevant firms and at advertising's many industry meetings). Where possible, we will conduct multiple repeat interviews with key informants. Analysis of primary-source documents, often technical in nature, will supplement and serve as a way of crosschecking fieldwork findings.

We will achieve impact beyond academia by providing unbiased information and research-based findings to practitioners, policymakers and the general public. The UK has by far the largest online advertising sector in Europe (Adshead et al 2019: 36); the sector's skills could be an important economic resource for the UK after its transitional arrangements with the EU end. But crucial policy issues remain to be resolved. Eg, the Information Commissioner's Office has said that data dissemination/processing for real-time bidding 'is taking place unlawfully' (ICO 2019: 23). The Competition and Markets Authority has suggested that concentrated market power in advertising may be undermining competition and harming consumers (CMA 2019&2020), and the Electoral Commission (2018) has called for greatly enhanced transparency in political advertising.