Book Review: Profit over privacy review

Profit Over Privacy (2021) is a stirring and well-written political economy of the US online advertising ecosystem. The book offers a nuanced and thorough examination of how internet advertising was developed – an important moment in the history of modern consumer culture. It ends with Google’s purchase of DoubleClick in 2006 (it is very much a historical text). Matthew Crain covers a critical and tumultuous period with impressive patience and an eye for detail, using an admirable range of historical sources. This book will be a go-to for those researching and teaching how the advertising ecosystem shapes consumption and how this came to be.

From the title alone, we can grasp Crain’s political standpoint on what he calls the “marketing complex” and later “surveillance advertising”. In the book’s opening pages, he states that “for the ownership class of Silicon Valley, digital advertising is a goldmine of epic proportions. For democratic society, it is gasoline on fire” (p. 1). Importantly, Crain does acknowledge that corporate surveillance is not a new phenomenon. He opens with a critique of Shoshanna Zuboff’s (2019) Surveillance Capitalism. He argues that this text often cites surveillance capitalism as a deviation rather than a continuation of existing advertising technologies and practices. For Crain, “surveillance advertising reflects a broader set of deeply rooted social needs within the capitalist political economy” (p. 10). I agree, but I think Crain could have further leaned into the historicization of surveillance advertising. As Josh Lauer and Kenneth Lipartitio note in their book Surveillance Capitalism in America, there is a history of “rationalization, bureaucratization and social control” in the US which is “traceable to the late 18th century forward” (Lauer and Lipartito, 2021: 2). There are a couple of moments when reading this book in which I was reminded of other complementary works (often from Media Studies), each of which could add important context for the relationships between politics, monitoring technologies, advertisers, and media. I have signposted these moments in the following review. But, for now, it is essential to remember that the political economy of media and communication are fertile fields from which to learn about how the surveillance and targeting of consumers have shaped representation, communication and culture in contemporary consumer life.

Chapter One opens in the early nineties. Crain tracks an impressive range of archival documents to demonstrate that Bill Clinton and Al Gore’s free market political standpoint was motivated by the unprecedented endorsement they received from the technology sector. He shows how these business lobbying efforts shaped their attitudes (at least partly), and the Clinton administration continued to ensure that the internet was as open as possible for global competition and growth. Importantly, Crain here shows how members of the ‘marketing complex’ (defined as private sector institutions who have an investment in the future of advertising) also wanted to ensure their longevity within emerging online spaces. Marketers wanted to keep consumers consuming and hoped the web would rely on advertising funding. These conditions led to the development of the “Coalition for Advertising Supported Information and Entertainment (CASIE)”, which Crain notes ran several campaigns in the 1990s.

Crain shows how the internet’s development and deregulation occurred precisely when free market ideology underscored critical decisions about the relationship between the private and public sectors. In this vein, the Clinton administration’s Framework for Electronic Commerce was developed in tandem with a range of private interests. Perspectives from Civil Society were consistently minimised during the consultation process. Some non-profits and advocacy groups were allowed into the mix, as long as they were deemed “not crazies” (p. 48) who didn’t want to “ambush” the New Democrats’ efforts to prioritise the private sector in the development of the internet. This Chapter makes a vital nod to the broader political environment in the US during this time, but I do wonder about the online futures imagined by other countries – such as France’s Minitel (Hill, 1997; Mailland and Driscoll, 2017) or Canada’s proposed alternative internet (Joseph, 2018), which may have provided very different perspectives on the role of advertising, privacy and relevant forms of regulation.

It’s worth noting that there is no focus on data collection and surveillance in these early Chapters of Profit Over Privacy. Instead, Crain shows here that the internet (at least in its development in the US) was formed in collaboration with many business interests, including marketers and early examples of venture capitalists working in Silicon Valley. The important throughline, and foundation for the rest of the book, is that the development of the internet was positioned as a US project to ensure Global Dominance and stimulate national growth. Crain shows how government actions that support “capitalist expansion and profitmaking are normalised and framed as non-interventionist” (p. 51). Commercially orientated approaches to policymaking were ultimately framed as neutral.

In Chapter 3, Crain covers the development of advertising networks between 1994 and 1997. Although some users found the ‘egalitarian’ to have near-utopian potential, advertisers struggled. The internet at this time was slow, poorly presented and clunkily delivered. Crain shows how advertising networks offered a solution to the logistical problems experienced by advertisers on the web by developing technological innovations. DoubleClick were very successful in this space; their skill was in making the ‘Wild West’ ad buying process both familiar and structured. They offered advertisers the opportunity for ads to run across bundles of relevant websites, and standardised their pricing into ‘CPM’ (cost per thousand advertising impressions).

The most promising aspect of the early banner ad was the ‘click’ verifying confirmation of audience attention and consumer interest. We know that marketing industries have long wanted tangible and interactive confirmation that eyeballs were pointed at their adverts. For example, in Desperately Seeking The Audience, Ien Ang has shown how television rating companies designed and used technological innovations for audience monitoring to measure and ‘verify’ whether people were watching television programming (Ang, 1991). One example of such a technology, the People Meter, was an electronic monitoring device that required audiences to press corresponding numbers on a keypad when they “zipped and zapped” through different television channels. In a description that eerily foreshadows the development of internet-enabled Cookies, the People Meter was “linked to the home by telephone line”, and “the system’s central computer correlates each viewer’s number with demographic data about them stored in its memory” (Ang, 1991: 79). The People Meter was applauded for its ability to provide precise data about audience demographics, that could be beamed to ratings companies overnight. However, just like banner ads, people got sick of clicking on the People Meter, and there were challenges to its accuracy. In response, ratings companies sought to improve their surveillance technologies. Suggestions included implanting “bugs in the navels of a people meter household” or a “photoelectric eye” inside the television set that “would watch you” (Ang, 1991: 81). Ang’s work fruitfully shows the precursors to consumer measurement technologies that were being developed by advertisers, ratings companies and broadcast media.

Users simply began to avoid (now ubiquitous) banner advertisements on the web. In response to their perceived intrusiveness and irrelevance, the marketing complex sought to ensure that adverts were as relevant as possible. Marketers wanted to be able to identify and remember users, and their previous interests. Luckily, a new technology developed by Netscape afforded this ability to remember - Cookies. Cookies could neatly be dispatched alongside banner ads, which now have a dual function – they could both advertise, and collect data. In the latter half of Chapter Three, Crain importantly shows that consumer consent for tracking became ‘built in’ to the original internet browser (Netscape), which facilitated a precedent for accepting tracking as default, leading to our contemporary advertising ecosystem.

In Chapter Four, we learn that the dot com bubble and the development of ‘surveillance advertising’ were highly complementary. Crain spends time here faithfully tracking the acquisitions and mergers made by DoubleClick to document their growth – but also pointing out that they were broke. Most of DoubleClick’s value came from stock shares and mergers, rather than client revenue. Ad networks needed to reach beyond their own dot com bubble and convince the offline marketing world of their potential and value.

Chapter Five shows how legacy marketing goliaths like Unilever and P&G had begun to publicly air criticisms related to the efficacy and measurement of online advertising. Interestingly, the CMOs of the same companies are still making the rounds today, complaining about the accuracy of audience measurement in digital advertising. In 2018 Unilever’s Marketing Chief Keith Weed blasted the “viewability, verification and value” of social media advertising (Vizard, 2018), and P&G’s Chief Brand Officer has publicly warned that social media platforms need to “improve areas such as viewability, ad fraud and measurement” (Roderick, 2017). Examining online advertising as a ‘multisided market’ (Nieborg and Poell, 2018) here is fruitful. The push/pull between advertisers, websites and social media platforms, and adtech continues to offer important context to media production and consumption.

Crain shows in Chapter Five that ad networks’ response to advertiser reticent was to move towards monopolisation – they wanted to be the facilitating intermediaries in this space who would work on behalf of agencies, marketers and retailers. Working towards this goal, networks engaged in a process which Crain defines as “proto-platformization” (p. 96). He defines this term as follows; “constructing a sociotechnical infrastructure of business relationships and technical capacities to facilitate the capture and exchange of consumer information at an accelerating scale and pace” (p. 97). To make this work, Crain shows how ad networks began to relax their terms, and develop systems allowing for barter around unused ad spaces.

We arrive at some meaty commentary on the harms that can be engendered by microtargeted advertising. Crain argues that “the practice of tailoring ad messages to specific audiences is not new, online behavioural profiling is of a qualitatively different character than the probability-based methods used to analyze and target mass media audiences” (p. 103). Crain draws from Joseph Turow’s work on targeted advertising industry to argue that this shift is particularly new and significant because advertisers can now combine past purchasing records, online behavioural data and demographic information (p. 103). He covers a number of efforts that allowed the targeting of consumers based on ethnicity, which he refers to as “weblining” after “redlining”. In closing this Chapter, Crain shows how advertising networks drove hard to collect more and more data because they were required to facilitate monitoring on behalf of reticent advertisers.

Here, I want to raise that DoubleClick is just one company in a long line of intermediaries who have shape media industries in their facilitation of adverting dollars. A historical comparison is Eileen Meehan’s examination of monopoly ratings companies in the US (Meehan, 2006). Like DoubleClick, Nielsen had pioneered a winner-take-all monopoly on ratings measurement for broadcast media. In order to stay on top, Nielsen manipulated their measurement strategies to make them the most valuable intermediary in this market. With this point in mind, one point that I felt was underexplored in Profit Over Privacy is the manufactured nature of DoubleClick’s (and other surveillance advertisers) measurement technologies and audience data. Crain argues in the book’s introduction that the inaccuracy of microtargeted advertising “misses the forest for the trees” (p. 5) – rather, it simply matters that surveillance infrastructure exists, and can be improved all the time. However, ad networks and other surveillance technologies are collecting, constructing and selling a product to advertisers, which is ultimately based on a hierarchy of audience value. In her work, Meehan shows how the ratings companies and media companies search for ‘bonafide’ prime time audiences, namely affluent white men in urban areas. Together, ratings companies, broadcasters and advertisers, limited representation within broadcast industries by pushing exploitative advertising to audiences who were perceived as less valuable. By examining the methodology of audience measurement and categorisation, we can understand advertising and media inequalities, practices and harms more accurately. Recent work has critiqued the accuracy of tracking (Hwang, 2020; Venkatadri et al., 2019). Like ratings “had nothing to do with who is actually watching television” ‘surveillance advertising’ may have realistically nothing to do with who is actually under surveillance (Meehan, 2006: 315).

In Chapter Six, Crain chronicles conflicts between marketing lobbyists and an upstart group of privacy activists who had started to formalise and grow. We learn about a number of civil society groups who began to mount a challenge to surveillance advertising, included family-orientated groups and civil liberties watchdogs. The Centre for Media Education are of particular significance to this story. Their primary concern was the effects of data collection on children. The CMA conducted an investigation on the website ‘Kids.com’ (which offered games and contests). They found that Kids.com was capturing children’s information through lengthy registration questionnaires, and sharing it with ad networks. Privacy activists were thus able to lead their pushback against ad networks by focusing on children’s privacy as these issues often catch more attention and funding. Crain suggests that the ‘will somebody think of the children?’ rallying cry began to work. CM’s report on the hidden collection of children’s data “Web of Deception” made for perfect headline fodder to shill to concerned parents.

Ultimately though, for privacy activists, there was no legal basis to make any complaint about user privacy violations because this kind of complaint did not fall under any existing jurisdiction of the Federal Trade Commission. To help us understand this, Crain circles back to the attitudes of policy described in Chapters One and Two, namely a drive towards self-regulation in the name of innovation and growth. However, we learn that, later, the FTC laments the lack of implementation of privacy policies and information for consumer data collection. They eventually recommended that Congress pursue legislation to facilitate parental control over the collection and use of children’s information. The push was also facilitated by the EU’s 1995 Data Protection Directive, which would disallow “data transfer” to countries who did not provide adequate levels of protection. These drives led to the development of the ‘Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act’ (COPPA) which mandated that sites collect parental consent before collecting data from children under 13. Despite COPPA’s issues, Crain points out that this legislation had a chilling effect for many involved in the marketing industry and ultimately pushed marketers to be more stringent about self-regulation. The industry responded by lobbying heavily, and although COPPA was introduced as USA’s first internet privacy law its recommendations were limited and Congress never produced any federal internet privacy legislation. For Crain, this was the original mission of the US Government in the privacy debate - “normalizing surveillance, making it palatable enough so that the internet’s commercialization could proceed unabated. Mission accomplished” (p. 134).

One limitation of this book is how Crain frames the relationship between advertisers and consumers as inherently oppositional. For example, he argues that “the heart of the enterprise is adversarial: capture people’s attention and try to persuade them to action, whether they ask for it or not” (p. 35). Framing the relationship between advertisers and consumers is provocative – a deeper examination of advertising practices and perceptions of consent would help to provide a thicker and more nuanced perspective of consumer-advertise relations here. Do marketers always just non-consensually jam their content through to our eyeballs, unbothered by audiences growing increasingly hostile, so long as they end up at the cash register? Maybe. But I believe that organising marketers and consumers into a ‘cat and mouse’ binary seems to ignore the improbable existence of ‘authenticity’ outside of consumer culture. In contemporary capitalism, consumers patchwork together meaning, identity and community through their consumption of brands (Banet-Weiser, 2012). By and large, marketers are important creative workers that co-produce many forms of media that we consume everyday. They operate within hegemonic spaces of imperialist capitalist ideology, like the rest of us. As such, we need to pay more attention to advertisers’ thoughts, feelings and motivations. These thicker, on the ground perspectives should come in addition to ‘top’ down political economic examinations of advertising industries. In my experience, marketers hold a perception of their work that goes beyond the purely economic, and it might be worth taking a closer look at what everyday marketers actually want from microtargeting technology. We could ask, for example, how these desires end up shaping the experience of, and engendering real harms to, platform users as consumers, audiences and citizens?