“Anything That Can Be Traded, Will Be Traded”: The Contests to Automate and Financialize Advertising Futures Markets

Abstract

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.

Spotify as a technology for integrating health, exercise and wellness practices into financialised capitalism

“…While Spotify has always used advertising as part of its funding model it has latterly taken a more central role to bolster returns for its ‘patient capital’ investors because the subscription model has so far failed to produce profits (Caplan and Gillespie, 2020; Eriksson et al, 2019; Ingham, 2019a; Johnston, 2021; Nieborg and Poell, 2018: 4278). The Spotify paid user experience now increasingly services the advertising business with the move to a ‘programmatic’ approach in which individual user interactions are auctioned to advertisers representing a key way engagement is commodified (Kininmonth, 2022: 3; McStay, 2017: 144; Spencer, 2017). Automated ‘real-time bidding’, which enables advertisers to choose the ads they want to run, who to target and how much they are willing to pay, has been described as ‘biopolitical marketing’ as it harnesses the ‘wild’ rhythms and disordered passions of online engagement and renders them predictable by forming them into ‘brand communities’ (McNeil, 2018; Zwick and Bradshaw, 2016: 96).…”

Optimizing Looking and Buying on Instagram: Tracing the Platformization of Advertising and Retail on Mobile Social Media

“…In total, the timeline we created draws on 395 trade press articles between 2010 and 2020, published in fifty different industry and trade press outlets, including Instagram's corporate blog. Like Kininmonth (2022), we argue that trade press provide a contemporaneous account of how industry discuss, make sense of and participate in market developments. The trade press narrate perceptions of Instagram's advertising model within the advertising, marketing and retail industries.…”

“…Our approach draws on similar attempts to reconstruct timelines of the development of platform features, business models, and markets by drawing on a combination of industry trade press and corporate materials like developer and business blogs. Nieborg and Helmond (2019) created a timeline of how Messenger developed, Helmond et al (2019) used the Wayback Machine to document Facebook's partnerships, and Kininmonth (2022) analyzed the development of programmatic futures markets for advertising. In each study, a collection of contemporaneously-generated material is used to construct a timeline, enabling a close investigation of how a platform and its features and relationships have developed and been narrated.…”