School of Social and Political Science

Description

Digital advertising involves bidding for individual advertising opportunities (the display of a particular ad on a particular phone or laptop screen in around a second’s time), a task that inherently involves the prediction of the value of each opportunity. This paper analyzes a simple but instructive case: the advertisement of free-to-play mobile phone games. 

It will begin by sketching the traditional (since 2012) individualized approach to prediction, and then discuss how that was severely disrupted in the case of iPhones by a 2021 Apple privacy initiative. It will then describe the latent conflict between Apple’s preferred de-individualized approach and other market participants’ efforts to rebuild at least partial individualization, and discuss the de-agencing of advertising’s human practitioners that the latter efforts seem to involve.  

The ’material political economy’ in the talk’s title refers to the economically significant and broadly political issues of where, materially, things happen (in the user’s phone, or on external servers?) and when: immediately, or only after a delay? The talk draws upon 110 interviews with 87 practitioners of digital advertising, of whom 12 have particular interests in games, other apps and their advertising.