Objects, Metrics and Practices: An Inquiry into the

Programmatic Advertising Ecosystem

Cristina Alaimo1 and Jannis Kallinikos2

1
Surrey Business School, University of Surrey, Guildford, UK
2
LSE, London School of Economics, London, UK

Abstract. Programmatic advertising is a large scale, real-time bidding process,

whereby ads are automatically assigned to available spaces across types of me-
dia and geographic regions upon an individual user’s browser request. The
large-scale automation of programmatic advertising requires the establishment
of standards and the development of technologies to govern the behavior of
market participants (sellers, buyers, intermediaries). We present evidence on the
rules of programmatic exchange and on the role played by a specific class of
digital objects, focusing in particular on the metrics to which they are linked
and how they define both the objects exchanged and the parameters of these ex-
changes. We furthermore demonstrate that the metrics and the technological
complexes associated with them are constituted by the institutional field of digi-
tal advertising and its complex technological infrastructure. Rather than being
simply means to monitor a pre-existing reality ‘out there’ (such as user or audi-
ence behavior) these metrics and techniques bring forward their own reality and
heavily impact upon and shape the objects and processes of digital advertising.

Keywords: Automation, Digital Advertising, Performativity, Digital Objects,

Information Infrastructures.

1 Introduction

Over the last two decades, the field of advertising has been undergoing dramatic
transformations that are reshaping the very process of advertising and remaking the
fundamental objects and actors involved in that process. This is forcefully evidenced
by the recent diffusion of what is referred to as programmatic advertising, whereby
ads are displayed to viewers or readers through a real time auction in a process of
dizzying computational and organizational complexity. We view advertising as a
social field or practice and we aim, accordingly, to document shifts in that practice
that result from the introduction of new objects and metrics, exchanges between ac-
tors and systems, and, ultimately, economic and power relations. The intersection of
economic pursuits with technology and their links to online media make the field of
programmatic advertising a particularly germane object of study that links to central
concerns of the conference call.
2

Advertisement -the process of calling user’s attention to a product or service by

way of paid announcements- has always been contingent on the assignment of advert
content to individuals. This process has traditionally occurred via the construct of the
audience, an anonymous and rather sizeable cohort of readers, viewers or listeners
that are supposed to share a few fundamental attributes to which an advert seeks to
appeal [29, 31]. The debate on the facticity of audiences has a long history in sociolo-
gy and media studies [see i.e. 4, 5, 6, 30]. Ettema and Whitney speak of “institutional-
ly effective audiences” [13, p. 5], a concept recently expanded by Napoli to signify
audiences that are “constructed and defined to reflect the economic and strategic im-
peratives of media organizations” and that “can be effectively integrated into the eco-
nomics of media industries” [24, p. 3]. Yet, IS scholarship is surprisingly lacking in
debating the facticity of concepts such as “user attention” or “audiences”, a fact that
becomes regretful in light of the recent technological advancements and the prolifera-
tion of metrics and tracking devices that are linked to the automation of advertising
exchanges. The knowledge gap on the functioning of digital media buying and ex-
change and their connected technologies is even more striking if one considers the
history and evolution of digital advertising and its profound interdependence with the
history of the web that attests to the importance advertising-based business models
have had for the majority of content, information and entertainment providers.
In what follows we present preliminary evidence from an ongoing study of the
process through which programmatic advertising operates. To grasp and better appre-
ciate the current transformations we retrace the recent evolution of the digital adver-
tising industry and its leaning toward user measurement and profiling. The reliance of
publishers to advertising-funded business models and the skepticism with which mar-
keters originally met the new medium fueled a rush to develop a range of data track-
ing devices, better tools for measuring, and the consequent mushrooming of data ana-
lytics companies which help publishers find convincing ways to demonstrate market-
ers’ return on investments (ROIs). Recently, the plunge toward more effective ways
of buying and selling ads online led to the rise of programmatic advertising and the
implementation of massive centralized virtual marketplaces called ad exchanges that
offer in real-time individual user profiles to bid on (Google owns one of the biggest
ad exchange platforms). Programmatic advertising is rapidly diffusing as a faster,
cheaper, and scalable alternative to previous methods of ad exchanges such as ad
networks and direct exchanges.
In its essence, programmatic advertising is a huge, real-time bidding process,
whereby ads are automatically assigned to media spaces across types of media and
geographic regions upon an individual user’s browser request. This means that the
entire ecosystem’s exchange with its hundreds of platforms operates “on-demand”,
every time a user’s browser opens a publisher website and triggers a real-time request
for an ad. The whole exchange is usually completed under 100 milli-seconds and
remains entirely invisible to the user who may experience a small lag in loading the
publisher page. Dubbed as the “holy grail of targeting” [see 29, p. 79], the automated
and real-time nature of ad exchanges characteristic of programmatic advertising re-
quires the establishment of standards and the development of technologies to govern
the behavior of market participants (sellers, buyers, intermediaries). Requests for real
 3

time bidding on available ad slots have to enter the ecosystem in appropriate data
formats and be exchanged using data objects, standardized conventions and IT-based
solutions that allow real-time computation to occur in an unprecedented, almost diz-
zying, scale.
The diffusion of automated exchanges and the move toward selling user attention
on demand opens yet another chapter in the evolution of digital advertising and, con-
sequently, of the web. Key in the developments we point to is the diffusion of com-
plex and distributed automated marketplaces which is itself contingent on the intro-
duction of a particular class of digital objects. In what follows, we recount their op-
erations and the measures they black-box. We frame our empirical study against the
background of tracking technologies linked to online marketing and we further draw
on theories of information infrastructures [7, 10, 16, 33] and other contributions
across the social sciences [11, 12, 21, 22] to reflect and theorize on our empirical
findings. The evidence we present indicates that the specific class of digital objects
that underlie programmatic advertising is closely linked to several metrics that define
both the objects exchanged and the parameters of these exchanges. We show the path
dependence of such metrics and demonstrate that the metrics and the technological
complexes associated with them are constituted by the institutional matrix of digital
advertising and its complex technological infrastructure. Rather than being simply
means to monitor a pre-existing reality ‘out there’ (such as user or audience behavior)
these metrics and techniques bring forward their own reality and heavily impact upon
and shape the objects of digital advertising.
This paper is organized as follows: in the next section we trace the history of digi-
tal advertising through the evolution of its digital objects. After having presented our
research design, we describe the findings of our empirical study focusing on the pro-
tocol, measures and digital objects that constitute the programmatic exchange. Fol-
lowing it, we discuss and reflect on the facticity of these data objects and link our
reflections to broader concerns on the performative role they have at the industry
level.

2 The Evolution of the Field of Digital Advertising

Since the beginning of the web, online publishers (the majority of content producers
such as newspapers and blogs and later also content distributors such as social media)
understood that a paid subscription model was not a tenable business option and de-
cided to rely on advertising-based business models. From that point on (early 1990s),
the development of the web content has been inherently linked to the development of
the digital advertising industry, its dynamics and technological evolution. Publishers
found themselves competing in an ever-increasing fragmented space to convince
marketers of the effectiveness of online advertising spending on their own websites
[see 29]. This in turn, quickly brought the mushrooming of data tracking devices,
measuring tools and data analytics companies.
In the mid-1990s, in fact, a systematic measurement of internet audiences did not
exist. The newly born digital advertising industry rushed to assemble a toolkit of
4

standards, measures and a lexicon borrowed from traditional commercial media and
adjusted to the web. Some of the old measures and standards persisted such as the
case, for instance, with the one used for the price setting. CPM or cost per mil (thou-
sand) has been the traditional standard price model for newspapers and other mass
media. In the CPM model, the price of a single ad is determined by the cost of reach-
ing one thousand individuals. The newly instituted sector maintained also and relied
on the concept of the ad impression used by traditional commercial media. The con-
cept has always been contested, yet its adoption online added more ambiguity with
respect to what constitutes an online impression. The basic definition of [an] “adver-
tisement that was sent to an individual who had clicked on a site’s page” [29] does not
specify if the ad is delivered on the site’s page or to what extent an individual may
effectively view the ad. As we show further ahead in the empirical section, these are
fundamental aspects upon which the measurability of programmatic exchange and the
cost of what is exchanged are constantly negotiated.
Other traditional methods of audience measurement crumbled under the changes
imposed by the new digital medium. The fragmentation of offering in the online me-
dium and the consequent dispersion of audiences across a number of sites rendered
questionable the relevance of traditional panel-based models of audience measure-
ment (like the Nielsen model) [see 6, 24, 25]. The difficulties in measuring audiences
and the skepticism of marketers and big clients toward the digital medium pushed
publishers and tech entrepreneurs to finding new ways to assess the presence of users
and their activities online. One such way was indeed to track the user “click”. Clicks
not only gave advertiser evidence of the presence of users but it produced as well the
detailed trace of their online activities. Publishers were quick in understanding that
the measurability of “clicks” was one of the absolute novelties of the new medium.
For the first time, marketers could have evidence of the effectiveness of their spend-
ing in advertising campaigns. It comes as no surprise that since roughly 1993 until
today the digital advertising industry has grown spiraling around the central assump-
tion that success in the business was a matter of finding more and more accurate ways
of measuring audience and to eventually prove ROIs. Napoli defines the new concept
of “audience” brought about by the proliferation of digital measuring and tracking
technologies as “audience information systems” [24]. The term aptly signifies the
major shift in the conception of audience caused by the use of data analytics [1, 2, 5,
6, 28]. To us, it also clearly points to the broader changes such shifts caused in the
dynamics and organization of the digital advertising domain.
The complex relationship between publishers (or sellers) and marketers (or buyers)
essentially developed on issues of measurability up to such extent that the entire evo-
lution of the sector can be narrated in terms of measures and its associated devices.
The evolution of the digital advertising industry has been driven by (i) crucial techno-
logical developments such as the development of the web browser, tracking technolo-
gies and automation; (ii) existing advertising industry dynamics, such as the concen-
tration and increasing power of media-buying and -planning and their consequent
push to audience measurability; and (iii) the overreliance of web content producers
(from big publishers to individual blogs) on versions of an advertising-business mod-
el. Within this paradigm, crucial technological developments coinciding with the
 5

implementation of a class of digital objects such as the cookies, the web beacons, the
pixel and other tracking and measuring devices, together with what they measure and
how, stands out as key to understanding the evolution of the field of digital advertis-
ing toward the rationalization and measurement of audiences and the influence it ex-
erts on the evolution of the web.
Galloway aptly defines the web browser as a “hiding machine,” given that its main
filtering and translating function actually hides the web [14]. The browser uses a set
of instructions (HTML) to filter, organize and display content. The browser allows
hyperlinking and marks a difference with the preceding text-only based web. For the
digital advertising industry, the browser allows the development of more sophisticated
forms of graphic advertising, linking and the hiding of tracking devices. Cookies were
invented by Lou Montulli in 1994 working for Netscape Communication to solve a
shopping problem [9, 29]. In the original HTTP protocol, each request made by a
user’s computer to a web browser would be treated as new. Shopping carts back then
had no way of linking different items to the same user. Machines read different items
as different choices of different users. To solve this issue Montulli created a small text
file that a website could place in a user computer with an identification code for the
user and its activities (clicks), effectively solving the problem of user identification
within and across sessions. Something invented as a solution to a relatively small
problem led to the development of an entire industry of tracking which still consti-
tutes the backbone of web advertising. Cookies gave computers a memory and user
browsers the authorization of storing user histories by design without consent or
knowledge from users [9]. The use of cookies quickly proliferated. Netscape installed
cookie-capabilities into Navigator in 1994, followed by Microsoft’s Internet Explorer
in 1995.
The reaction of the industry was immediate and brought the development of a set
of related industry practices and new service-related companies. The fact that cookies
were implemented with a “same origin policy” –meaning that only the originator of
the cookie could read the information stored in it, led to the emergence of ad net-
works. These alliances of publisher websites often led by an intermediary emerged to
implement cross-sites tracking of users (with the so called “third-party” cookies) and,
in so doing, they offered better audience analytics and measurement to advertisers
[26, 29].
The activity of ad networks became fundamental to the field of digital advertising
for a number of reasons. Ad networks offered a solution to the problem caused by the
increasing fragmentation of content –what has been called the “long tail” [3] and the
fact that audiences, differently from traditional commercial media, were spread across
a number of different small websites. Ad networks aggregated publishers (called affil-
iates) and exchanged the possibility of installing and reading cookies across websites
for a share of the revenue they made by selling the possibility to reach a certain kind
of audience. They grew from accounting for 5% of ad impressions sold in 2006 to
30% of ad impressions sold in 2007 [IAB in 24, p. 71]. One of the reasons of this
success was that ad networks capitalized on the oversupply of publisher inventory;
that is, the available ad slots in a publisher’s online space. This remnant inventory
was thus aggregated and auctioned by ad networks to media buyers at a discounted
6

price. Although ad networks helped publishers sell their remnant inventory (which on
average accounted for the 80% of the total inventory) the long-term effect of their
operations was to move the attention of media buyers and planners from contexts (i.e.
the publisher site or its reputation) to users [29]. The ad network auction system let
marketers bid for impressions but did not reveal the websites where the impression
was being delivered. Effectively what was on offer was the trackability of users rather
than an ad space on a reputable publisher outlet.
One of the most important ad networks was DoubleClick. Founded in 1995, the
company has been at the center of the media attention several times, most notably for
having merged with Abacus Direct, an offline database of consumers amidst fear of
privacy breach, for having been investigated by The Federal Trade Commission and
for having been bought by Google in 2007. DoubleClick also implemented the first
automated version of ad serving technology with its DART (Dynamic Advertising
Reporting & Targeting) a software which automated the ad buying process for adver-
tisers and minimized unsold inventory for publishers. Ad serving technology is an
important building block of today’s media buying and planning. The basic functional-
ities of ad serving technology gradually evolved to respond to the need of publishers
that wanted to sell the same ad slot to more than one marketer. At the beginning, ad
serving was made of pieces of codes that rotated different creatives (the content of an
ad) into a single ad slot on a publisher’s site. This was followed by the development
of a set of metrics to optimize the ad delivery. A ranking system called waterfall ro-
tated the different creatives on the basis of a number of pre-set goals and performance
metrics that related to user click, post-click and post-impression activities and interac-
tions. The data from these basic functionalities were gradually incorporated into more
sophisticated versions of serving technology like the DART system that was able to
support decision making in an increasingly automated way. The system was eventual-
ly integrated with Google DoubleClick ad exchange, the centralized marketplace of
programmatic advertising ecosystem.

3 Research Design and Methodology

The research is based on case study research design that combines the investigation of
the field of programmatic advertising (the case) with a field-embedded case study of
Smartology an independent, demand-side platform and trading desk [32].
The field-embedded study has been conducted over a period of 24 months in the
company headquarters in London, UK and entailed two periods of 5 and 7 months
respectively, with a year of follow-up communications and industry research in be-
tween. The first period covered the work of the company in the direct (traditional)
digital advertising ecosystem. The second extended into the migration of the company
to the programmatic advertising and its integration with the most important ad ex-
change platforms: Google Ad Exchange and Index Ad Exchange. Data were collected
through semi structured ethnographic interviews (20), direct observations, company’s
internal documents (50) including reports, system screenshots, console screenshots,
live logs examples and demonstrations. Additional data on the field of programmatic
 7

advertising have been collected with industry expert interviews (Google AdSense,
Pangaea Alliance, Xaxis) but also a large range of industry documents, including
Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) publicly available documents (35), other exter-
nal documents (55), US patent applications (12) and other secondary resources such
as industry reports, news articles and whitepapers.
Data were collected and analyzed following Yin’s [32] procedure of constructing a
case study database and case study protocol to maintain a coherent narrative and chain
of events. Shifting between the two levels (filed and company) has been essential to
acquiring a more complete and nuance view of the complexity of programmatic ad-
vertising.

4 The Programmatic Ecosystem: Facts and Processes

The drive toward effective ways of buying and selling ads online has led to the estab-
lishment of massive centralized virtual marketplaces called ad exchanges. Such mar-
ketplaces essentially overcome the fragmentation of online media and advertisers
through massive, real time auction processes that evolve around the browsing behav-
iors (ad impressions) of huge user crowds. These centralized and automated buying
systems hosted by ad exchange are rapidly diffusing as a more efficient alternative to
the methods of ad exchanges reviewed in the previous section hosted by ad networks.
In what follows, we paint the work of ad exchanges in large brush strokes.
The automated method of buying and selling ads in large scale, distributed ecosys-
tems happens between platforms that act on behalf of traditional actors such as online
publishers and marketers (buyers, sellers) and novel actors such as various data bro-
kers and intermediaries. Demand Side Platforms (DSP that act on behalf of market-
ers), Supply Side Platforms (SSP that act on behalf of publishers) and many Data
Management Platforms (DMP) exchange massive flows of data in real time as they
seek to buy individual user attention. As indicated, the entire ecosystem’s exchange,
with its hundreds of platforms, operates “on-demand”, every time a user’s browser
opens a publisher’s website and triggers a real-time request for an ad. The massive,
automated and real-time nature of ad exchanges occurring in the programmatic adver-
tising ecosystem requires the establishment of standards and technologies to govern
the behavior of market participants (DSP, SSP and SMP) and deal successfully with
the protean data tasks their exchanges requires.
The Real-Time Bidding (RTB) protocol is the rule-book of the auctioning process
in the field. The RTB Protocol derives from a concerted work undertaken by a group
of demand-side and supply-side platforms in 2010. Under the supervision of the IAB,
these platforms started to lay down the standards for the programmatic exchange.
Following the adoption success, OpenRTB was introduced as an IAB standard in
January 2012. JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is the suggested format for bid
request and bid response data payloads but not the only one adopted. Google AdX, for
instance, offers three protocol options; (1) Ad Exchange protobuf, (2) Open RTB
protobuf and (3) Open RTB JSON. Meanwhile, Index Exchange, an independent
Toronto-based ad exchange, only supports Open RTB JSON.
8

Fig. 1 illustrates the Open RTB exchange ecosystem, although it depicts the flow
as unidirectional exchanges, most of what happens in the ecosystem is interactive and
runs in both directions.

Fig. 1. Schematic representation of RTB exchange [18]. [From the top left] 0. A user browses
online and opens a newspaper article (or any other content-based website). In so doing, the
user’s browser produces an ad impression. The article’s ad inventory has been listed by the
newspaper in a Supply Side Platform (SSP) (for instance, DoubleClick for publishers). 1. The
ad exchange platform issues a “bid request” for the given impression of an ad slot. The differ-
ent “bidders” or Demand Side Platforms (DSP) connected to the Google ad exchange platform
will receive a “bid request” object, with details of the impression being sold, sometimes includ-
ing minimum CPM (cost per mille impression), and other attributes or parameters. The DSP
bidders respond with a “bid response” object, if the bid request they receive is of interest to
them, they will respond with details about the ad and a bid offer in CPM. If not, a null bid re-
sponse object will be sent. 2a. 2b. The ad exchange processes all the bid responses for the given
bid request and declares the winner: the highest bid that fits all the requested parameters. The
winning ad will be delivered and shown on the newspaper’s article page within 100 milli-
seconds from the moment the use’s browser accessed that page. Data about user behavior and
post-click activity are usually collected by different systems for assessing campaigns and retar-
geting users.

The automated process is made possible by the work of the protocol and the set of
digital objects that the protocol requires. The bid request and bid response objects talk
to each other via a set of embedded objects and pre-set parameters that allow the ex-
change to happen. One of the most important objects of the RTB protocol is the ad
impression object. Ad impressions are digital objects that have been set up to repre-
sent the likelihood of a single user to view an ad. An ad impression is defined as “the
moment (a window of opportunity) between the fetching of an ad from its source as
the result of the user’s browser activity and the delivery of the ad” [19]. Ad impres-
sion objects are encapsulated in the bid request object (Fig. 1: 1) that needs to contain
at least one ad impression object to trigger the exchange. The ad impression object is
at the same time the good being exchanged and the rules of the exchange (its attrib-
utes or parameters). It contains different attributes that refer to: type of ad (banner,
 9

video, native) subordinated to the impression object, size, price such as bid floor, if
any, modality of exchange, such as for instance if the object is exchanged through
private marketplace (PMP), the expected time lag between bid winning and effective
ad delivery (exp) and an array of metrics.
AdX, in particular, supplies three metrics of the ad impression object: viewability,
click-through rate and video completion rate. Viewability is an estimate of the likeli-
hood that the ad slot will be viewable by the end user, based on a range of indicators.
It is expressed as percentage and calculated by taking into account historical data on
user behavior and ad slot attribute data such as certain pixel and exposure thresholds,
usually counting a minimum of 50% of the ad’s pixel exposure for 1 or 2 continuous
seconds [23, p.7], although this may vary across exchanges. Viewability refers to the
likelihood or “opportunity to see”. It does not therefore signify or stand for an actual
viewing of the ad by the end user. It rather counts surrounding or environment factors
of the ad slot such as visibility (if the ad is above or below the fold), a threshold expo-
sure and a set of behavioral data on user (if available). These attributes can also be
used as a selection and filtering criteria to find impressions and ad slots worth re-
sponding and bidding on. In this respect, viewability –an estimate of the likelihood or
opportunity to see– becomes the criterion shaping a decision to bid in the pre-bidding
phase.

5 Discussion: conjectural Objects and the Management of Time

The automation of real time bidding in the programmatic domain depends on a very
complex IT infrastructure which is quickly growing both in scale and scope. The
complexity arising from the automation of the core exchanges in an over-fragmented
landscape of actors, business contexts, media and technologies is partially dealt with
the establishment of a range of new objects. These include ad impressions, bid re-
quests, action requirements and templates and, crucially as our study suggests, a range
of metrics that lend facticity to these objects and monitor their movements along the
virtual space of programmatic advertising [10, 17, 20].
It is worth pointing out that these metrics act as soft industry or market standards.
By this we mean that measures such as viewability in essence work as acceptable
representations of the function and facticity of the entities or objects of programmatic
advertising that –despite the structuring they are subject to by the real-time bidding
protocol (RTB)– remain evasive. A good example that we have repeatedly touched
upon is the fundamental entity of ad impression. What is an ad impression in fact? Ad
impression has an institutional history yet it does not have a physical reality outside
the advertising ecosystem.
As we have shown in the literature review section, ad impression has been the ob-
ject of conflicts and highly contested definitions. A common definition of ad impres-
sion such as the “advertisement that [was] sent to an individual who had clicked on a
site’s page” [29] brought conflicts on issues of what is exactly delivered and whether
this is actually viewed by the user. This is of particular relevance given that ad im-
pressions are the building blocks of the CPM price structure, what marketers pay for.
10

The advent of programmatic signaled yet another change to the definition of ad im-
pressions that still remain highly contested. Ad impressions are now defined as the
time lapse between a user’s browser fetching a webpage with available ad slots and
the effective display on the webpage of ads. This definition would suggest that every
time a single browser fetches a webpage with at least one available ad slot a single ad
impression is produced and exchanged. It is crucial to make clear that this change is
of far reaching significance. Traditionally, impressions were quantified by ex post
audience measurements, i.e. newspaper readership or television audience share con-
stricted by panel measurements. Now, by contrast, they are sold ex ante, ahead of
being effectively produced (i.e. the time lapse before ads are displayed) and therefore
prior to user’s attention being captured and measured.
Effectively, marketers bid on the likelihood that users see their ads. The metric of
viewability is a way of fixing the unstable nature of ad impressions. Yet, these metrics
are just industry conventions, the outcome of the negotiation of field participants with
respect to how to manage the ambiguous nature of ad impressions and the intangible
character of exchanges between actors and machines that on most essential respects
are no more than data exchanges of future events. Viewability and click-through rates
are the metrics intended to lend facticity to ad impressions. As it is often the case with
metrics, because of the possibility of counting, viewability of impression appears as a
fact rather than an object whose embedment in reality is variously problematic. These
metrics are themselves hard to grasp. They are usually hidden away within complex
multi-layered digital objects (viewability is an attribute of an ad impression object
encapsulated in a bid-request object). They are estimates or likelihoods subjected to
the limits, conventions and affordances of data tracking, recording and computing
systems. They are often the result of complex industry negotiations [7] and they are
ill-tolerated standards which have lost both their link with reality and their credibility
within the industry.
Drawing on Elena Esposito, we call the entities constructed by these metrics con-
jectural objects [11, 12]. The term indicates that such objects do not exist as inde-
pendent givens but only as relational constructs involved in the representation of yet-
to-be objects. They are relational to the degree that they exist in a matrix of connec-
tions to other objects and actions and forward looking in the sense of seeking to regu-
late future occurrences. Conjectural entities are registered in other domains. They can
be interest-rate shaping objects such as the LIBOR [13, 21, 22], ratios, indexes and
soft standards such as measures that help structure actors’ expectations by consolidat-
ing a practice that develops around their exchanges. In the case of financial-
derivatives, for instance, such objects were developed to solve “the most pressing
issue which was standardizing the underlying asset to an extent sufficient for claims
on it to be tradable without reference to any specific physical entities” [22, p. 368].
A similar issue, we suggest, is present in the programmatic advertising domain,
where the exchange is based on non-physical, yet-to-be objects such as ad impres-
sions whose future realization is contingent on the interplay with other objects. As of
today, one of the industry leading bodies, the IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau) is
pushing for the adoption of the “viewable impression” object. Viewable impressions
are ad impressions that match “certain pixel and time exposure thresholds (minimum
 11

50% of the ad’s pixel for 1 or 2 continuous seconds for display and video respective-
ly)” [23, p. 7]. As the Media Rating Council (MRC) digital audience-based measure-
ment standards document continues: “viewable impressions are now the minimum
required unit for digital audience-based measurement including digital and cross-
media reach, frequency and GRP [Gross Rating Point]” [23, p. 7].
The excerpt is important because it attests to the shift in modes of measuring atten-
tion (and audiences) which now relies, rather heavily, on the affordances of the auto-
mated exchange. Standards such as viewability and pixels cannot measure user (actu-
al) response. They can only count the time an ad can be visible on a page and the
position the ad has on the screen (machine-to-machine). These metrics can be coupled
with click measurement and other data as they are acquired from Data Management
Platforms to calculate the likelihood of an ad being viewed. Audience measurement
(reach, frequency and GRP) thus becomes the aggregation and computation of viewa-
ble impressions –while the ad impression measurability lends facticity to user atten-
tion.
It is worth to point out that there is no human agency involved here as these meas-
urements and standards develop in highly automated exchanges, whereby machines
talk to other machines in quick and massive interactions of data flows. Humans are of
course the initiators of the process both in the form of end users whose clicking be-
havior triggers the web browser’s request of an ad and, certainly, through the many
actions and decisions of key industry actors that have been essential in setting up this
hyper-complex ecosystem. However, the programmatic exchange of data, objects and
measures which make today’s digital advertising ecosystem –including the “user-
audience” concept– is designed to operate without any further involvement of human-
agents (on either side). As we have just seen, viewability is designed to measure the
involvement of human users by substituting it with machine-readable metrics such as
time and exposure of an ad on screen, plus history of clicks or profiles compiled and
sold by third-party, data analytics, and platforms.
Conjectural objects arise out of the mutual expectations of the actors involved in
the exchange and the infrastructure underlying the exchange, and act as reliable terms
of reference for the actors involved. They are conjectural because they are involved in
lending facticity to a promise that has yet to happen. It is crucial to clarify that the
programmatic is neither involved in selling ads nor ad impressions (what would these
be anyway?) The ecosystem rather trades the computable likelihood of an ad to be
seen by a user, or as the industry calls it an “opportunity to see”. This, we believe,
makes them a different kind of objects that seem particularly germane to study, given
their performative role in producing what is measured and exchanged, and how it is
exchanged in the field of programmatic advertising. Effectively, here performativity
assumes another dimension as it signifies the involvement of machines in the objects
being measured which in the case of advertisement are audience and user attention.
Even though IS as a field has only intermittently and indirectly dealt with these issues
[1, 27], the debate on the facticity of concepts such as “audience” and “attention” has
a long history in sociology and media studies, as pointed out in the introduction. Yet,
the current developments that coincide with the diffusion of programmatic advertising
aggravate the difficulties of establishing a field whose commercial relations are con-
12

tingent on estimates and likelihoods of future occurrences realized out of the interac-
tions of networks of intangible objects. As our empirical study illustrates, these diffi-
culties are addressed not with a turn to reality but with a further leap into the conjec-
tures of a probable world whose articulation (and calculation) requires the further
separation of the entire ecosystem from real life events and the capabilities of human
actors.
The advent of a data-driven rationalization paradigm in audience and attention
measurement and the rush toward measurability has over time changed the objects
observed. Traditional audience and attention mapping techniques measured content
consumption with panels and adopted metrics and ranks on publisher outlets and
reputations, audience habits and so forth. In the new paradigm we have presented
here, publishers and their outlets have lost ground and power because marketers un-
derstood that the “click” was giving them the possibility of following user across
contexts independently from publishers. The passage shifted the attention from the
publisher to the user, making content outlets (webpages) less important. The machin-
ery of ad networks relegated web publishers further into the background as on ad
networks’ auctions marketers actually bid on impression (user attention) without see-
ing where their ads will go. Ad networks made publishers literally invisible, contrib-
uting to their loss of power in the industry.
The advent of ad exchanges, we contend, has brought yet another important shift as
it changed the modality in which audience measurement takes place and thus the ob-
ject measured (audience). As seen, within the programmatic domain human-users
loose importance as actors and as observable objects. In fact, their role is marginal for
the effective completion of the exchange process. To work effectively on such a large
scale, programmatic needs to replace human involvement with machines: software,
platforms, and objects. In a sense, viewable impressions are purposely designed to
replace other indicators to measure audience response with machine-readable ones.
The unintended consequence of setting up such a complex data exchange and com-
munication ecosystem that replaces human-machines assemblages with nearly closed
circuits of machines-to-machine communication is the rise of what we conceive as
path-dependent megastructures, massive automated infrastructures where each layer
generates integral accidents that are solved by adding other layers [8, 10].

6 Final remarks

Our empirical study suggests that the field of programmatic advertising carries the
standard problems of attention capture and audience measurement into an entirely
new stage by setting up a hyper-complex machinery of data tracking tools, semi-
automated platforms, bidding algorithms and protocols. This technological complex
and the practices and interests to which it is related establish a new institutional con-
text in which attention is defined and tracked in new ways that further technicalize the
perception and measurement of it and considerably automate the ways it is being trad-
ed and monetized. The changes we document have key attributes of a self-referential,
or path-dependent, process whereby each step taken draws on, reinforces, and devel-
 13

ops what is already in place [7, 16]. The outcome of this process is the creation of
larger enclaves of automated sequences that considerably tweak and replace older
practices with machine-to-machine data exchanges and which, in the case of conjec-
tural objects, trade the future for the present [11].
By linking audience measurement to the technological affordances of automated
exchange in massive platform ecosystems we contribute to the study of automation
and of its consequences. Our findings clearly indicate a drifting away of measurement
techniques from user behavior data to contextual data, something that allows for a
faster and smoother exchange as it mostly relies on the mutual programming of digital
objects. Furthermore, what we observe in the field of digital advertising has parallels
to other industries which are becoming increasingly dominated by the reciprocal pro-
gramming of conjectural objects such as finance and, increasingly, the digital travel
industry sector. Programmatic advertising is then part and parcel of broader changes
in which human exchanges are increasingly infiltrated and structured by the techno-
logical dynamics and the economic interests they serve.

7 References
1. Aaltonen, A. and Tempini, N., 2014. Everything counts in large amounts: A critical realist
case study on data-based production. Journal of Information Technology, 29(1), pp. 97-
110.
2. Alaimo, C. and Kallinikos, J., 2017. Computing the everyday: Social media as data plat-
forms. The Information Society, 33(4), pp. 175-191.
3. Anderson, C. 2007. The Long Tail: How Endless Choice is Creating Unlimited Demand.
New York: Random House.
4. Ang, I., 2006. Desperately seeking the audience. London: Routledge.
5. Bermejo, F. 2007. The Internet Audience: Constitution and Measurement. New York:
Lang
6. Bermejo, F. 2009. Audience Manufacture in historical Perspective: From Broadcasting to
Google. New Media and Society. 11 (1). pp. 133-154
7. Bowker, G. C. and Star, S. L. 1999. Sorting things out: Classification and its consequenc-
es. Cambridge MA: MIT press.
8. Bratton, B.H., 2016. The stack: On software and sovereignty. Cambridge MA: MIT press.
9. Carmi, E. 2017. Regulating behaviours on the European Union internet, the case of spam
versus cookies, International Review of Law, Computers & Technology
10. Ciborra, C. 2006. Imbrication of representations: Risk and digital technologies. Journal of
Management Studies, 43(6), pp. 1339-1356
11. Esposito, E. 2008. Probabilità improbabili. La realtà della finzione nella società moderna.
Roma: Meltemi Editore.
12. Esposito, E. 2013. The structures of uncertainty: Performativity and unpredictability in
economic operations. Economy and Society, 42(1), pp. 102-129
13. Ettema, J.S. and Whitney, D.C., 1994. Audiencemaking: How the media create the audi-
ence. London: SAGE
14. Galloway, A.R., 2004. Protocol: How control exists after decentralization. Cambridge
MA: MIT press.
15. Google for Developers, 2018 Real-Time Bidding Protocol, Online at:
https://developers.google.com/ad-exchange/rtb/openrtb-guide
14

16. Hanseth, O. 2000. The economics of standards. In C. Ciborra (Ed.), From control to drift:
The dynamics of corporate information infrastructures, pp. 56-70, Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press.
17. Hanseth, O. and Lyyttinen, K. 2010. Design theory for dynamic complexity in information
infrastructures: the case of building internet. Journal of information technology, 25(1), pp.
1-19.
18. IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau), 2016. Open RTB Protocol Specification (API speci-
fication v2.5, 2016): S7. Online at: http://www.iab.com/wp-
content/uploads/2016/03/OpenRTB-API-Specification-Version-2-5-FINAL.pdf
19. IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau), 2004, Interactive Audience Measurement and Ad-
vertising Campaign Reporting and Audit Guidelines, Online at: https://www.iab.com/wp-
content/uploads/2014/10/Ad-Impression-Measurement-guideline-Global.pdf
20. Kallinikos, J. 2005. The order of technology: Complexity and control in a connected
world. Information and Organization, 15, pp. 185-202.
21. MacKenzie, D. 2006. An Engine, Not a Camera. How Financial Models Shape Markets.
Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
22. MacKenzie, D. 2007. The material production of virtuality: Innovation, cultural geography
and facticity in derivatives markets. Economy and Society, 36(3), pp. 355-37
23. MRC (Media Rating Council) and IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau), 2017. Digital
Audience-Based Measurement Standards v5.1 Public Comment Draft. Online at:
http://mediaratingcouncil.org/MRC%20Digital%20Audience-
Based%20Public%20Comment%20Draft.pdf
24. Napoli, P.M., 2011. Audience evolution: New technologies and the transformation of me-
dia audiences. New York: Columbia University Press.
25. Napoli, P.M., 2012. Audience economics: Media institutions and the audience market-
place. New York: Columbia University Press.
26. Schwartz, J. 2001. Giving Web a Memory Cost its Users Privacy, The New York Times,
Sep. 4, 2001, Online at: https://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/04/business/giving-web-a-
memory-cost-its-users-privacy.html
27. Scott, S.V. and Orlikowski, W.J. 2014. Entanglements in practice: Performing anonymity
through social media. MIS Quarterly, 38 (3), pp. 873-893.
28. Taneja, H. and Mamoria, U., 2012. Measuring media use across platforms: Evolving audi-
ence information systems. International Journal on Media Management, 14(2), pp. 121-
140.
29. Turow, J., 2011. The daily you: How the new advertising industry is defining your identity
and your worth. Yale University Press.
30. Webster, J.G., 2014. The marketplace of attention: How audiences take shape in a digital
age. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
31. Wu, T., 2017. The attention merchants: The epic scramble to get inside our heads. Vin-
tage.
32. Yin, R. 2013. Case Study Research Design: Design and methods. London: Sage.
33. Yoo, Y., Henfridsson, O., & Lyytinen, K. 2010. Research commentary--the new organiz-
ing logic of digital innovation: An agenda for information systems research. Information
Systems Research, 21(4), pp. 724-735.