People-based marketing and the cultural economies of attribution metrics

ABSTRACT

This article examines People-Based Marketing (PBM) to theorize the cultural economies of attribution metrics. Through an analysis of marketing discourses, acquisition patterns, and marketing collaborations, it examines how platform capitalism is increasingly directed towards developing cross-device identity standards that consolidate performance metrics across digital markets. PBM extends the processes of platform capitalization across media properties, and the ways that claims of value and relevance are imbricated with the metricization of behavioral change in digital markets. The imperative of PBM to standardize techniques of identification and to make media increasingly measurable across markets has been a catalyst for new forms of data resolutions through strategic acquisitions and identity resolution consortiums. Moreover, emerging regulatory changes such as GDPR may in effect further reinforce trends towards the consolidation of data management and analytics platforms necessary to resolve identity across markets.

KEYWORDS:

• Marketing
• platform capitalism
• data analytics industries

Acknowledgements

I would first like to acknowledge and thank the two anonymous reviewers and editors for their constructive feedback. Special thanks also to Roger Burrows and Jennie Day for their invaluable editing and proofreading assistance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Harrison Smith is a research associate at the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape, Newcastle University. His research examines smart cities and data analytics industries with a focus on surveillance and marketing.

ORCID

Harrison Smith http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8144-5754

Notes

1. See: Deckers (2012) for an example of how vernacular discourses of marketing and ad tech conflict, and how actors sometimes push-back at ‘marketing bullshit’, and Auletta (2018) for a recent analysis of the impact of Silicon Valley on advertising culture.

2. The Association of National Advertisers commissioned a 2015 study of ad fraud and media rebates that, most recently, has been under investigation by the FBI as a potential criminal case into US media buying practices.

3. See https://www.iab.com/

4. https://www.adidentity.org/

5. For example, Vista Equity Partners in 2016 purchased Marketo for $1.8 billion, and in 2018 sold it to Adobe for $4.8 billion.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada under Grant 752-2014-2618.