{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,5,4]],"date-time":"2026-05-04T23:22:32Z","timestamp":1777936952329,"version":"3.51.4"},"reference-count":79,"publisher":"SAGE Publications","issue":"11-12","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2019,5,6]],"date-time":"2019-05-06T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1557100800000},"content-version":"tdm","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/journals.sagepub.com\/page\/policies\/text-and-data-mining-license"}],"funder":[{"DOI":"10.13039\/501100000155","name":"Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","id":[{"id":"10.13039\/501100000155","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"publisher"}]}],"content-domain":{"domain":["journals.sagepub.com"],"crossmark-restriction":true},"short-container-title":["New Media &amp; Society"],"published-print":{"date-parts":[[2019,11]]},"abstract":"<jats:p>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 \u201cad tech\u201d 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.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1177\/1461444819846449","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2019,5,6]],"date-time":"2019-05-06T09:28:12Z","timestamp":1557134892000},"page":"2366-2385","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1177\/sage-journals-update-policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":30,"title":["Automating the audience commodity: The unacknowledged ancestry of programmatic 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