"Public Culture and Private Value: Advertising Optimization Models and the Financing of American Mass Media"

The U.S. advertising industry has long claimed to act as a key patron for free and democratic communications. For media systems reliant on advertising revenue, advertisers and their agencies have assumed a de facto responsibility for making allocative decisions about the production and distribution of public culture. In particular, agencies’ media departments make routine but consequential choices about where to channel advertisers’ money. This paper looks at how this relationship was remediated in the 1960s by the uptake of digital computers and mathematical models among large agencies. Focusing on BBDO’s application of linear programming techniques to the problem of selecting media placements to maximize clients’ return on investment, I discuss how processes of computerization and an emergent ideology of optimization affected both the advertising industry’s broad commitment to financing mass media and the specific orientation of media departments toward the interests of clients and the public. Agency media departments had always worked strategically to satisfy clients’ objectives, but the rationalizing pressures that surrounded the adoption of computers and mathematical models encouraged an intensive focus on the formal optimization of private value, as defined by each advertiser. Drawing on evidence from historical trade publications and archival materials from the early 1960s, I consider how this increasingly technological project of maximizing private value for advertisers sits alongside the advertising industry’s commitments to producing culture in the public interest.