Google Radio Automation and the broadcast plights behind platformization

Abstract

In 2006, Google entered the broadcast radio industry in an attempt to prove it could diversify its ad sales technology beyond the web. With a product called Google Radio Automation, the company simultaneously installed its ad tech and ingratiated itself with radio producers. Histories of automation and programmatic advertising in American radio help to contextualize Google’s project and trace the roots of its failure. Publicity materials, industry reporting, and interviews with engineers and managers illuminate Google’s efforts toward cultural and industrial integration with radio. Problems related more to consolidation than to technological change thwarted those efforts and saw Google abruptly shift its attention to streaming audio in 2009. Revisiting a time when platform companies sought to infiltrate rather than replace older media, this article proposes that the turn toward a new media paradigm had more to do with old media plights than with the insight of technology firms.