Thread · 4 tweets · 4 May 2021

"Automating the audience commodity: The unacknowledged ancestry of programmatic advertising", by @LJamesMcGuigan This draws the ancestry of programmatic all the way back to the automation of TV buying six decades ago. It's super interesting. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/14…

One fascinating aspect that this reveals is that programmatic isn't a *consequence* of the Internet; rather it has been shaping the Internet to feed a much older beast that seeks to commodify people and publishers.

It's important to understand this history to keep a clear head in discussions about the future of advertising. Advertising is a key business model of the internet, perhaps *the* key business model here. But it can be done in many different ways that are different optima.

Today's programmatic isn't "the business model of the internet", it's using the internet to deploy an older business model designed to empower agencies. We should keep this in mind to design a system that empowers the actors we feel should be empowered.