Programming, filtering, adblocking: advertising and media automation

Abstract

This article considers automation in relation to digital advertising. At the intersection of the advertising industries and everyday media experience, we now find two connected, contending technologies, embodying different visions of automation and the future of advertising and digital media. On the industry side, there is programmatic advertising – defined broadly as the automation of the sale and delivery of digital advertising, where the appearance of advertising on a website is controlled by software rather than human decision-making. On the consumer side, there are the filtering technologies of adblocking, designed to enable users to remove unwanted ads from websites or other Internet applications. This article discusses each of these technologies, before considering the challenges raised for them by an increasingly mobile, diverse and stratified Internet.