University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2018 Selling The American People: Data, Technology, And The Calculated Transformation Of Advertising Lee Mcguigan University of Pennsylvania, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the Communication Commons Recommended Citation Mcguigan, Lee, "Selling The American People: Data, Technology, And The Calculated Transformation Of Advertising" (2018). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 3159. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/3159 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/3159 For more information, please contact [email protected]. Selling The American People: Data, Technology, And The Calculated Transformation Of Advertising Abstract This dissertation tells the history of a future imagined by advertisers as they interpreted and constructed the affordances of digital information technologies. It looks at how related efforts to predict and influence consumer habits and to package and sell audience attention helped orchestrate the marriage of behavioral science and big-data analytics that defines digital marketing today. My research shows how advertising and commercial media industries rebuilt their information infrastructures around electronic data processing, networked computing, and elaborate forms of quantitative analysis, beginning in the 1950s. Advertisers, agencies, and media companies accommodated their activities to increasingly calculated ways of thinking about consumers and audiences, and to more statistical and computational forms of judgement. Responding to existing priorities and challenges, and to perceived opportunities to move closer to underlying ambitions, a variety of actors envisioned the future of marketing and media through a set of possibilities that became central to the commercialization of digital communications. People involved in the television business today use the term “advanced advertising” to describe a set of abilities at the heart of internet and mobile marketing: programmability (automation), addressability (personalization), shoppability (interactive commerce), and accountability (measurement and analytics). In contrast to the perception that these are unique elements of a “new” digital media environment that emerged in the mid-1990s, I find that these themes appear conspicuously in designs for using and shaping information technologies over the course of the past six decades. I use these potential abilities as entry points for analyzing a broader shift in advertising and commercial media that began well before the popular arrival of the internet. Across the second half of the twentieth century, the advertising industry, a major cultural and economic institution, was reconstructed around the goal of expanding its abilities to account for and calculate more of social and personal life. This transformation sits at an intersection where the processing of data, the processing of commerce, and the processing of culture collide. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group Communication First Advisor Joseph Turow Keywords Advertising, Calculation, History, Information, Political economy, Technology Subject Categories Communication This dissertation is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/3159 SELLING THE AMERICAN PEOPLE: DATA, TECHNOLOGY, AND THE CALCULATED TRANSFORMATION OF ADVERTISING Lee McGuigan A DISSERTATION in Communication Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2018 Supervisor of Dissertation ________________________ Joseph Turow, Robert Lewis Shayon Professor of Communication Graduate Group Chairperson ________________________ Guobin Yang, Grace Lee Boggs Professor of Communication and Sociology Dissertation Committee Oscar H. Gandy, Jr., Professor Emeritus of Communication Carolyn Marvin, Frances Yates Emeritus Professor of Communication Victor Pickard, Associate Professor of Communication SELLING THE AMERICAN PEOPLE: DATA, TECHNOLOGY, AND THE CALCULATED TRANSFORMATION OF ADVERTISING COPYRIGHT 2018 Lee McGuigan This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/ iii For my family and friends iv ACKNOWLEDGMENT None of this would have been possible without the support of my family, especially my parents, Diane and John, and my wife, Emily. Along with my brother, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and in-laws, these people have enabled and motivated everything I do. I want to thank the people who took time to talk with me and help me understand the things I write about in this work. Thanks, also, to the organizations that let me attend events at discounted rates, or in a few cases, for free. Thanks to Brian Kenny and the Cable Center’s Barco Library for allowing me to visit and make use of archival materials—an enormously educational experience. And thanks to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for supporting my research. Importantly, I could not have even begun on this work without the extraordinary librarianship of Sharon Black and Min Zhong. I have been fortunate to benefit from the mentorship and collegiality of many brilliant people, both at Penn and, previously, at the University of Western Ontario. My experiences at UWO set me on a path that took me to places I never would have imagined. I am grateful most of all to Edward Comor, Robert Babe, Daniel Robinson, Alison Hearn, Keir Keightley, James Compton, Sandra Smeltzer, Nick Dyer- Witheford, Michael Daubs, Kyle Asquith, Henry Svec, Channelle Martin, Andrea Benoit, and Liam Young. My frequent collaborator, Vincent Manzerolle, deserves special commendation. Like all my other work, most of what follows is an artful repackaging of Vince’s ideas. In supervising me toward completion of this dissertation, Joseph Turow performed masterfully at a job that must have been difficult, or at least often unpleasant. I was supported by an outstanding committee, with each member making major contributions to my development. Victor Pickard helped me find my footing in the program. Carolyn Marvin pushed me to be more careful in making and evaluating claims. And Oscar Gandy was extraordinarily generous in giving his time, attention, and guidance. Many others at the Annenberg School contributed meaningfully to my time here, including Litty Paxton, Monroe Price, Sharrona Pearl, Guobin Yang, Marwan Kraidy, Michael Delli Carpini, and Barbie Zelizer. Barbie’s activities brought me into contact with Robin Mansell and Dan Schiller, both of whom have impacted me in tremendously positive and lasting ways. I have also benefited—more than I deserve—from interactions v with more senior collaborators and mentors, including Graham Murdock, Janet Wasko, Eileen Meehan, and Anthony Nadler. Finally, it has been a privilege to work with the wonderful students and staff at ASC. I owe more than I could possibly say to more people than I can name here. For outstanding patience in enduring my friendship, I thank: Rosemary Clark-Parsons, Aaron Shapiro, Corrina Laughlin, Emily Hund, Ope Akanbi, Omar Al-Ghazzi, Kevin Gotkin, Anne Kaun, Sam Oliver, Christin Scholz, Nora Draper, Deb Lui, Elena Maris, and Sanjay Jolly. This is a painfully incomplete list of the many people whose Herculean efforts have made me appear useful. vi ABSTRACT SELLING THE AMERICAN PEOPLE: DATA, TECHNOLOGY AND THE CALCULATED EVOLUTION OF ADVERTISING Lee McGuigan Joseph Turow This dissertation tells the history of a future imagined by advertisers as they interpreted and constructed the affordances of digital information technologies. It looks at how related efforts to predict and influence consumer habits and to package and sell audience attention helped orchestrate the marriage of behavioral science and big-data analytics that defines digital marketing today. My research shows how advertising and commercial media industries rebuilt their information infrastructures around electronic data processing, networked computing, and elaborate forms of quantitative analysis, beginning in the 1950s. Advertisers, agencies, and media companies accommodated their activities to increasingly calculated ways of thinking about consumers and audiences, and to more statistical and computational forms of judgement. Responding to existing priorities and challenges, and to perceived opportunities to move closer to underlying ambitions, a variety of actors envisioned the future of marketing and media through a set of possibilities that became central to the commercialization of digital communications. People involved in the television business today use the term “advanced advertising” to describe a set of abilities at the heart of internet and mobile marketing: programmability (automation), addressability (personalization), shoppability (interactive commerce), and accountability (measurement and analytics). In contrast to the perception that these are unique elements of a “new” digital media environment that emerged in the mid-1990s, I find that these themes appear conspicuously in designs for using and shaping information technologies over the course of the past six decades. I use these potential abilities as entry points for analyzing a broader shift in advertising and commercial