Selling the American People

Lee McGuigan is Assistant Professor in the Hussman School of Journalism and Media at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and an associate at Cornell Tech’s Digital Life Initiative. He is a coeditor of The Audience Commodity in a Digital Age.

Acknowledgments vii
I Dreams and Designs to Optimize Advertising
Introduction: A World Marketers Can Count On 3
1 AdTech Flows: Claims, Logistics, and Optimization in Digital Advertising 27
2 Advertising's Calculative Evolution 49
3 Optimization Takes Command I: Management Technique, from the Military to Madison Avenue 71
4 Optimization Takes Command II: The Rule of Calculation 101
II An Archaeology of Affordances
Interlude 131
5 How AdTech Got Its Spots: Computers, Automation, and the Roots of Programmatic Advertising 133
6 Addressing the American Person: Designs for Producing an Audience of One 165
7 Buy-Button Fantasies: The Persistence of Shoppability 193
8 Vive Le Roi! Accountability and the Pulling Power of Attribution 211
Conclusion 241
Notes 253
Index 317