You Think You Know How Misinformation Spreads? Welcome to the Hellhole of Programatic Advertising

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1. An excerpt by Steven Brill:

   Every workday, approximately 2,500 people sit at desktops or laptops using these programmatic advertising algorithms to spend tens of millions of dollars an hour. They work at advertising agencies scattered around the world, or, in the case of some major companies, at their in-house advertising shops. Their titles might be “programmatic specialist,” “programmatic associate,” or “campaign manager.”

   What they have in common is that they are usually in their first jobs out of college. Although many work from home post-Covid, if they are in the office, they sit at carrels in large open spaces that resemble the trading floor of a stock brokerage. The process is like a stock exchange, except that the buyer doesn’t know what stock he is buying, meaning that the advertiser doesn’t know whose advertising inventory he is buying.

   The product is you—the person whose data has been harvested so exquisitely that you are the advertiser’s target. You are the “stock” that the advertiser is buying. The core idea of programmatic advertising is that where you are seeing the ad doesn’t matter.

   This marks a sea change in the advertising industry. And it’s absolutely ripe with misinformation.

   Read the full excerpt: [https://www.wired.com/story/death-of-truth-misinformation-advertising/](https://www.wired.com/story/death-of-truth-misinformation-advertising/)

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