Audience Marketplace Research Articles

Automating the audience commodity: The unacknowledged ancestry of programmatic advertising

Programmatic advertising describes techniques for automating and optimizing transactions in the audience marketplace. Facilitating real-time bidding for audience impressions and personalized targeting, programmatic technologies are at the leading edge of digital, data-driven advertising. But almost no research considers programmatic advertising within a general history of information technology in commercial media industries. The computerization of advertising and media buying remains curiously unexamined. Using archival sources, this study situates programmatic advertising within a longer trajectory, focusing on the incorporation of electronic data processing into the spot television business, starting in the 1950s. The article makes three contributions: it illustrates that (1) demands for information, data processing, and rapid communications have long been central to advertising and media buying; (2) automation “ad tech” developed gradually through efforts to coordinate and accelerate transactions; and (3) the use of computers to increase efficiency and approach mathematical optimization reformatted calculative resources for media and marketing decisions.

Programmatic trading: the future of audience economics

ABSTRACTCommunication researchers examining how audiences are commoditised in the audience marketplace by commercial media providers and advertisers have been using audience economic models that were applied to commercial television, radio and print audiences. New digital technologies are transforming the way audiences are commoditised and previous models of the audience marketplace are not applicable to the new audience marketplace. This paper examines how audience economy and audience marketplace theories evolved and describes how programmatic advertising—the automated trading of the audience commodity—differs from previous audience theories requiring a need to re-examine these theories. New digital technology is being used to not only find audiences online but also uses data to create profiles of individuals audience members. The datafied audience plays a central role in the programmatic trading of the evolving audience commodity and the new audience marketplace that has emerged.

Reconfiguring the Audience Commodity

Changes in the ways that audiences use television, and the ways in which such usage can be measured, raise the possibility of a transformation of the audience commodity, and the currency that fuels the audience marketplace. Specifically, it appears at this point that social media analytics are beginning to play a role in how television program success is measured, and in how advertising dollars are allocated across programs. Essentially, then, the emergence of social TV analytics represents the possibility of a new market information regime taking hold in the audience marketplace. Working from an institutional theoretical framework, this article uses trade materials as a window into industry dynamics and discourses in an effort to provide an account of the recent emergence and usage of social TV analytics in the U.S. television industry and thus explore the process of institutionalization of a new market information regime.

How structure shapes content, or why the ‘Hindi turn’ of Star Plus became the ‘Hindu turn’

Why was there in the year 2000 a significant shift in the representation of families on Indian soap operas, from middle-class nuclear families with independent working women to upper-class joint families with only homemakers; and from milieus in which the religion of the characters was incidental, to milieus in which the Hindu religion and the performance of it was of central importance? I argue that a confluence of three forces enabled these shifts: (1) in marketing, a radical ‘bottom-of-the-pyramid’ approach; (2) in TV, the industry’s attempts to find audiences in large numbers, mediated by the structure of the Indian audience measurement system; and (3) Hindu nationalists’ focus on ‘middle-class’ audiences. In other words, I show how the very structure of the audience marketplace, especially the Indian television audience measurement system and shifts in marketing practices, abets the naturalization of particular political discourses within popular cultural forms, in this case Hindu nationalist discourse within television soap opera. This article makes a significant contribution to audience measurement studies and, by showing the mechanics of the naturalization of Hindu nationalist ideologies in popular culture, contributes to the literature investigating the influence of ideologies of nationalism in everyday life.

Audience Evolution and the Future of Audience Research

This article considers how changes in audience behaviors and in audience information systems are affecting the future of academic audience research. This article first illustrates how changes in the media environment are undermining traditional approaches to audience research while also giving rise to alternative analytical approaches. This article then outlines the contours of a next-generation audience research agenda that reflects these ongoing conceptual and methodological developments. Reflecting these developments, this article next argues for a definition of ratings analysis that focuses not on a particular aspect of audience behavior (i.e., exposure), but on whatever forms of currency are employed in the audience marketplace. From this standpoint, the new media environment provides new forms of “ratings” that exist alongside—and integrate with—the old, and that can renew and revitalize the field of ratings analysis.

Handbook of media management and economics

Handbook of Media Management and Alan B. Albarran, Sylvia M. Chan-Olmsted, and Michael O. Wirth, eds. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2006. 750 pp. $195 hbk. $79.95 pbk. We might never again see so many academic leaders on the business side of journalism gathered together in a single volume. Comprehensive at 750 pages, this is the first handbook on the study of the business dynamics of mass media companies and their managerial foundations of technology, advertising sales, finance, marketing, and personnel. It is unique as a single resource summarizing existing knowledge in media management and media economics, and it should inspire other researchers to explore even further. The Handbook is divided into four sections. Articles by thirty-four national and international scholars examine theoretical components, key issues, analytical tools, and suggested directions for future research. Researchers will especially appreciate the extensive bibliographies after each article and the detailed index. Alan B. Albarran of the University of North Texas and Robert G. Picard of Sweden's Jonkoping University start the book with overviews of historical research trends in media management and in media economics, respectively. Like most of the Handbook's writers, Albarran and Picard are widely published. Albarran is best known as the author of Management of Electronic Media, while Picard's sixteen books include The Economics and Financing of Media Companies. The remaining twenty-eight articles are too numerous to describe here other than to say that they consistently show strong scholarship in each of the major subjects. A few examples, to give an idea of the systematic range of topics and the quality of scholars chosen to cover them, follow: * Philip M. Napoli of Fordham University, author of Audience Economics: Media Institutions and the Audience Marketplace, wrote the article Issues in Media Management and the Public Interest. * Douglas A. Ferguson of the College of Charleston, author of several books about television including Media Programming: Strategies and Practice, wrote Industry-Specific Management Issues. * Randal A. Beam of Indiana University, former head of AEJMC's Media Management and Economics Division, wrote Quantitative Methods in Media Management and Economics. Many of the Handbook's other writers are department chairs and long-time professors in media management or media economics, and some are from universities abroad. There's even one management consultant. One could always wish that authors and editors of other important books on media management and economics would have been represented, such as Ben Bagdikian, Robert McChesney and Geneva Overholser-but you can't squeeze in everybody. …

Book Review: Audience Economics: Media Institutions and the Audience Marketplace

Book Review: Audience Economics: Media Institutions and the Audience Marketplace

Book Review: Audience Economics: Media Institutions and the Audience Marketplace

Book Review: Audience Economics: Media Institutions and the Audience Marketplace

Modelling the audience marketplace

Philip M. Napoli’s book is a broad and systematic analysis of the many economic factors that shape the business of measuring audiences for use in financial transactions in the broadcast, cable, and online industries in the United States. At first glance, then, Audience Economics appears to boldly go where many scholars have gone before. Indeed, a number of seminal works have explored the processes by which media institutions conduct research about the audience and process this information into commodified abstractions which often bear little resemblance to actual viewers (e.g. Ang 1991; Ettema and Whitney 1994; Gitlin 1983; Meehan 1984, 1990, 1993; Turow 1997; Webster and Phalen 1997). Summing up the thrust of much of this critique, Ang (1991) aptly described the notion of television audiences generated by media industries as little more than ‘taxonomic collectives’; intangible groups of individuals brought together simply by virtue of their simultaneous attention to the same audio-visual source.

The audience product and the new media environment: Implications for the economics of media industries

Audiences are the primary product manufactured and sold by advertisersupported media. In selling audiences to advertisers, media firms deal in human attention, which resists the type of exact verification and quantification typical of transactions in other industries (Napoli forthcoming). Verifying the presence of human attention to media generally requires entering people’s living rooms, bedrooms and cars, and monitoring their behaviour. For such monitoring to be maximally effective requires audience members’ explicit permission and cooperation to turn something as abstract as attention into tangible data that can be sold in the marketplace. In addition, the audience product is produced from raw materials (consumers) that the producers (media organizations and audience measurement firms) can not control (Berry & Waldfogel 1999). Since the production of audiences is not controlled by the manufacturers, any efforts to bring predictability and rationality to the process of producing audiences must draw upon a sophisticated understanding of the essentially uncontrollable, yet somewhat predictable, behaviour of media audiences. Thus, the economics of advertising-supported media revolve around efforts to predict and measure the behaviour of media consumers. Such efforts persist because greater effectiveness in audience prediction and audience measurement brings greater efficiency and greater revenues to the audience marketplace (Barnes & Thomson 1988, 1994; Fournier & Martin 1983). By the same token, conditions that undermine such efforts damage the audience marketplace. Ongoing changes in the media environment have the potential to cause such damage. The purpose of this article is to identify the key means by which the new media environment is threatening to undermine the audience marketplace. By focusing on such issues, this article is intended to serve as a counterweight to the prominent discourse emphasizing the opportunities and benefits the new media environment offers advertisers and content providers. This analysis is organized around a conceptual model in which the audience product is separated into three interrelated components: (a) the predicted audience; (b) the measured audience; and (c) the actual audience. As this article will illustrate, the new media environment is increasing the disconnects between these components of the audience product.