The mood of information : a critique of online behavioural advertising

198 Pages·2011·1.16 MB·English

by  Andrew McStay

The Mood of Information
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The Mood of Information
A Critique of Online
Behavioural Advertising
Andrew McStay
2011
The Continuum International Publishing Group
80 Maiden Lane, Suite 704, New York, NY 10038
The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX
www.continuumbooks.com
Copyright © 2011 by Andrew McStay
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by
any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording,
or otherwise, without the written permission of the publishers.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McStay, Andrew, 1975-
The mood of information: online behavioural advertising /
by Andrew McStay. -- 1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-1-4411-7614-1 (hardcover: alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 1-4411-7614-4 (hardcover: alk. paper)
1. Internet advertising. 2. Consumer behavior. I. Title.
HF6146.I58M39 2011
659.14’4--dc22 2010035950
ISBN: HB: 978-1-4411-7614-1
Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India
Printed and bound in the United States of America
Contents
Chapter 1: Introduction: Setting the Scene 1
Chapter 2: Exploring the Controversy over DPI and Phorm 15
Chapter 3: Self-interest, Rationality and Regulation 43
Chapter 4: Artifi cial Barriers? 68
Chapter 5: Controlling the Mood of Information 87
Chapter 6: Compiling Interiority 125
Chapter 7: Conclusions 143
Notes 154
List of Abbreviations 157
Bibliography 159
Index 185
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Chapter 1
Introduction: Setting the Scene
The business of advertising is undergoing seismic activity as it asserts its
role in a twenty-fi rst century defi ned by networks and digital devices.
Online advertising now jostles with television as the medium of choice
among advertisers and superseded print and radio some time ago. The
advent of online and wider digital media has presented today’s Mad Men
with headaches and challenges, as well as opportunities. As highlighted
in my fi rst book, Digital Advertising, there is a dizzying array of means
to reach and engage consumers via the internet. These include display
advertising, locative targeting, geo-tagging, augmented reality, viral for-
mats, metaverses, social media campaigns, classifi eds, search, the humble
sponsored link and a range of other platforms in between with trends
emerging at a rate diffi cult for even the keenest watchers to keep up with
or make sense of. This book investigates online behavioural advertising
and takes up Raymond Williams’ challenge in ‘Advertising: The Magic Sys-
tem’, which posits that the real business of the historian of advertising is
to trace the development from processes of specifi c attention and
information to an institutionalized system of commercial information
and persuasion; to relate this to changes in society and in the eco-
nomy; and to trace changes in method in the context of changing
organizations and intentions. (2005 [1980], p. 170)
What he is calling for is, in essence, the employment of political
economy to study advertising. This book then has little interest in advert-
ising texts, instead, preferring to concentrate on form over content; the
manner in which advertising is circulated; the means by which users’
actions are accounted for over a period of time; coupling and complex-
ity; and factors having to do with the ways in which subjectivity is
engaged by behavioural advertising systems and mined for information.
To understand this palpable transformation in the reach of the market
2 The Mood of Information
requires awareness of cognate advertising businesses, institutions, law
and regulation, the social construction of privacy, techniques of hand-
ling information, profi ling, technocultural antecedents of behavioural
control systems and related factors accounted for here that give rise to
the contemporary means of buying, selling and circulating the output of
attention and the mining of behaviour.
This book then is about online behavioural advertising and the nature
of the relationship it establishes with users of the internet. It seeks to
better understand the changing nature of advertising and the techno-
cultural, legal and political environment it operates within. Given its
relatively recent emergence, many may be unfamiliar with the term
‘online behavioural advertising’, while remaining subject to its practices.
Generally, online behavioural advertising involves tracking users’ brows-
ing activity over a period of time for the purposes of serving advertising
tailored to what organizations working on behalf of advertisers assume
are users’ interests. It is a form of commercial solicitation that is intrins-
ically reliant on data both wittingly and unwittingly provided by users
and is made up of two different forms: one involving the delivery of
advertising based on assessment of users’ web-based movements; the
second involving the examination of communication and information
as it passes through the gateways of internet service providers (ISPs). My
argument here is that the relationship established between behavioural
advertising systems and users is highly unique and marks a departure
from traditional relationships between advertising and consumers. Such
a personalized technique of advertising represents signifi cant revenue
for all businesses involved: these being comprised of advertisers, advert-
ising networks, advertising agencies and online content producers
and web publishers. Given that advertising remains a key determinant of
online media content, culture and economy, behavioural advertising
represents an important phenomenon for examination.
Although online behavioural advertising is a highly specifi c subject, it
is one that teases out well the make-up and orientation of a digital eco-
nomy defi ned by a tendency towards informational transparency, at least
in regards to terms and conditions of use. This arises in a milieu of
informational abundance where services and content are often ‘free’, at
least in the sense that money does not change hands between the giver
and receiver of information. Perhaps most conspicuous is the will-to-
quantifi cation and that although the need to defi ne audiences has long
been understood, the vigour with which they are pursued and parsed is of
a substantially different order today. As such this book sits within a wider
Introduction 3
domain of contexts, technologies and techniques where in regards to
mediatised experience we now see the intensifi cation of discourses of
personalization, customer relationship management, recommendation,
co-production, constructivism and the pre-empting of intent. Such
omnipresence has led critics to query the extent to which these systems
will structure and determine our lives, mediate our identities and affect
social and power relationships. This book then represents a departure
from the more familiar interrogation of visual components of advert-
ising to one based on structure, systems and relationships between
people and advertising systems. Although systems that circulate data and
facilitate the delivery of advertising are less discernable than visual mani-
festations of advertising production, the impact of online behavioural
advertising is no less as profi ling machines are integrated into day-to-day
life. The path we are on is a constructivist one where through personal
media technologies, applications and feedback we facilitate and create a
tailored perspective of how we see and experience the digital environ-
ment. Such user-centricism is heterogeneous in nature and through data
mining and the inferring of preferences, wishes, desires and orientations
we strike relationships with advertising systems that refl ect ways of being,
or moods of information.
Beyond the Bubble
Some background is required to set the context from which this book
departs. Online behavioural advertising developed out of web advert-
ising that fi rst made its appearance on webpages in 1994 when banner
advertising was placed on HotWired’s website1. Advertisers and the wider
advertising industry quickly recognized the potential for measurability,
accountability, quantifi able effectiveness and ‘return on investment’,
although there rightly existed signifi cant scepticism as to the reach and
scope of online media. Along with other dot.com businesses the online
advertising industry went through the inception, bubble and burst cycle
so common to the technology sector. In spite of this, as Perez (2002) in
discussion of technological revolutions describes, although bubbles
defl ate, new infrastructures are left in place and this is no different for
online advertising. The overall growth of online advertising has been
exponential, even considering the blip in upward trajectory that was the
dot.com crash between Q1 2001 and Q1 2002 when the bubble fell in on
itself. Assessed overall, the downturn in online advertising was minor