Automating the audience commodity: The unacknowledged ancestry of programmatic advertising

Programmatic advertising describes techniques for automating and optimizing transactions in the audience marketplace. Facilitating real-time bidding for audience impressions and personalized targeting, programmatic technologies are at the leading edge of digital, data-driven advertising. But almost no research considers programmatic advertising within a general history of information technology in commercial media industries. The computerization of advertising and media buying remains curiously unexamined. Using archival sources, this study situates programmatic advertising within a longer trajectory, focusing on the incorporation of electronic data processing into the spot television business, starting in the 1950s. The article makes three contributions: it illustrates that (1) demands for information, data processing, and rapid communications have long been central to advertising and media buying; (2) automation “ad tech” developed gradually through efforts to coordinate and accelerate transactions; and (3) the use of computers to increase efficiency and approach mathematical optimization reformatted calculative resources for media and marketing decisions.