The Routledge companion to advertising and promotional culture

Routledge

3 sphere. The rise of promotion as an end in itself in culture and politics is surely a key ingredient of what has come to be known as “post-truth politics”(Hannan 2018). A significant proportion of digital advertising is delivered via “adtech,” also known as programmatic advertising that involves real-time bidding, and a large loose network of digital advertising companies that facilitate—and profit from—data collection, automated ad placement, and target marketing. The complexity of this mode of advertising distribution has facilitated widespread fraud in ad sales and discriminatory targeting, not to mention the funneling of ad revenues to websites and apps that would have been much less likely to attract ad revenue in a more conventional mediabuying system—particularly digital sites hosting disinformation and hate (Braun and Eklund 2019; Noble 2018).
The system of programmatic advertising rests on a “new normal” of our digital information environment: its dependence on personal data collection or its embrace of “surveillance capitalism”(Crain 2021; Zuboff 2015). While funding the free content of the internet has long involved selling not just our eyeballs but in-depth data about our online behavior, the intrusiveness and ubiquity of this data collection has only intensified as new forms of data collection become possible through voice, biometrics, and mobile technologies, facilitated by the sheer amount of time and range of activities that we now do online.