This article explores potential advertising futures markets that may emerge from current trends of automation and financialization in digital advertising. Managing price and availability is important to advertisers for securing prices and premium inventory and to publishers for safeguarding long-term revenue. The article compares US network television’s annual upfront events with adtech company the New York Interactive Advertising Exchange (NYIAX). This article contributes two primary observations. First, that buying and selling forward advertising inventory is an important, and understudied, part of advertising markets. Second, the design of infrastructures that enable adverting futures markets are social and contested. The formation and framing of forward media markets has consequences for the advertising industry at a time of critical juncture and for broader media that rely on advertising revenue.

This article examines how video tours of data centres visually foreground physical security infrastructure. Despite the importance of cloud computing to many people’s lives, data centres, a key piece of cloud computing infrastructure, are often hidden from public view — but not always. Many companies promote their services by making tour videos of their data centres. An emerging body of research in media and communication studies has examined how promotional material visualises data centres, but there is little research on how promotional videos represent physical security infrastructure. This paper consists of a qualitative content analysis of 66 data centre tour videos from data centres located around the world. It finds that data centre video tours often spend significant time visualising security features used to protect data centres from unauthorised physical access. The videos often feature various security measures, including 24-hour guards, boom gates, fences, radio-frequency identification (RFID) cards, guard stations, biometric scanners, man traps and underfloor lasers. I argue that the video tours are marketing materials that act as security theatre and foreground physical security features to perform a security discourse of control over territory, people and data. The videos also unexpectedly foreground human labour within the security apparatus. They demonstrate that security infrastructure governs the workers that maintain it.

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This paper examines how the Australian advertising industry debates trust in the infrastructures of digital advertising. The advertising industry is undergoing a major change as digital advertising is increasingly dominated by new advertising technology (adtech) players and major tech companies such as Facebook and Google. These new companies which rely on automated systems of ad targeting, pricing and placement to control large amounts of digital advertising inventory and offer new more ‘efficient’ ways to micro-target advertising. Yet these companies have garnered reputations for misrepresenting their numbers; a problem compounded by Google and Facebook’s reticence to provide independent audience verification. This has led to a high degree of mistrust from Australian advertisers. Neither Google or Facebook offers serious third-party auditing, leading many in the advertising industry to say that they are ‘marking their own homework’. In this paper I ask, how is trust of measurement and verification infrastructures debated within the digital advertising industry? Is it fair to compare businesses that distribute advertising in very different ways? I answer these questions through qualitative analysis of submissions made to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) as part of its current Digital Platforms Inquiry (DPI) in 2018 and 2019. I also draw on summaries of four public forums the ACCC held in 2018 as well as wide reading in the advertising industry trade press. This paper aims to contribute to a better understanding of the role standards and measures play within industry and how they relate to trust during industry transformation.