Inside Digital Advertising: Platforms, Power, and Material Politics

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Donald MacKenzie (University of Edinburgh, UK) Koray Caliskan (Parsons School of Design, the New School, NY)

Inside Digital Advertising

Platforms, Power, and Material Politics

Donald MacKenzie (University of Edinburgh, UK), Koray Caliskan (Parsons School of Design, the New School, NY)

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Hardback

Forthcoming
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English

Polity Press
23 October 2025

Sociology & anthropology

Dozens of times daily, access to your screen is auctioned to advertisers, sometimes by your own phone or laptop without your knowledge. In the background are huge, electricity-hungry, carbon-emitting systems that conduct roughly two trillion near-instantaneous, automated auctions every day.

This book takes you into the heart of this mysterious world. It describes how Google built its astonishing global system of warehouse-scale computing and turned that system into an unprecedented, multibillion-dollar, money-earning machine, and how Facebook – almost by accident – also became an advertising leviathan. It examines the tensions between those giants and the smaller firms that populate digital advertising’s open marketplace. Those tensions, as well as conflicts over user privacy, give rise to a new kind of politics that plays out in material systems in the form of crucial clashes between different ways of designing those systems. Building on work in the emerging interdisciplinary field of market studies, MacKenzie and Caliskan examine digital advertising’s material politics, its giant megamachines, and the foundations of platform power.

Inside Digital Advertising lays bare the processes that underpin today’s global advertising industry. It will be a key book for students and academics in the social sciences, humanities, and business studies, and it will appeal to anyone interested in the forces that are shaping our everyday digital world.

By: Donald MacKenzie (University of Edinburgh UK), Koray Caliskan (Parsons School of Design, the New School, NY)
Imprint: Polity Press
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
ISBN: 9781509568635
ISBN 10: 1509568638
Pages: 251
Publication Date: 23 October 2025
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Donald MacKenzie is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Edinburgh. Koray Caliskan is a Professor of Economic Sociology and Design at the New School, New York City.

Reviews for Inside Digital Advertising: Platforms, Power, and Material Politics

""This book exposes how digital advertising has evolved into a material 'megamachine' - an infrastructure of interconnected systems shaped by power, politics, and profit. A must-read for understanding its hidden mechanics and environmental impact."" Anne Helmond, Utrecht University ""Inside Digital Advertising is a very useful introduction to central aspects of buying and selling advertisements on the internet. I would recommend it to an advanced class on digital advertising, to graduate students who care about the digital world, and to media professors wanting an intensive introduction to the programmatic advertising arena."" Joseph Turow, author of The Daily You and The Problem with Personalization